Extended Desynchronization for Multi-Hop Topologies

Desynchronization is a biologically inspired primitive [8] for periodic but temporary exclusive access to a shared resource, like the transmission medium. In this paper, we recapitulate the single-hop desynchronization algorithm DESYNC [5, 2, 6] for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and identify its lack of handling hidden nodes in multi-hop environments. We explain in detail our decentralized and selforganizing multi-hop extension EXTENDED-DESYNC, solving the hidden node problem although it uses just locally available information. We further inspect several scenarios and topologies to prove convergence of our algorithm and to demonstrate its robustness and flexibility against dynamic changes within multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks, like adding or removing nodes. We thus show that EXTENDEDDESYNC desynchronizes well in spite of hidden nodes. We finally outline a few useful add-ons for our algorithm and its possible fields of application.