Swarming activities to distribute information in large sensor networks

In nature, large autonomous networks of organisms form swarms adopting strategies that are highly adaptable and can serve as an inspiration for the design of future sensor networks. The technique we propose in this paper is inspired by the "integrate-and-fire" model applied the analysis of many biological swarms. This technique, which we call opportunistic large arrays (OLA), allows to efficiently flood a wireless network with information and, at the same time, permits to transmit reliably to far destinations that the individual nodes are not able to reach (the reachback problem). The idea is that the leader will ignite an avalanche of signals from the other nodes and the resulting distributed activity will constitute specific patterns embedding information from the leader and the nodes themselves. An adaptive receiver that acquires the resulting pattern, will be used to extract the information produced. We show, through numerical simulations, that in broadcasting applications our system gains in both energy-savings and broadcasting delay.