Fireflies as Role Models for Synchronization in Ad Hoc Networks

Fireflies exhibit a fascinating phenomenon of spontaneous synchronization that occurs in nature: at dawn, they gather on trees and synchronize progressively without relying on a central entity. The present article reviews this process by looking at experiments that were made on fireflies and the mathematical model of Mirollo and Strogatz, which provides key rules to obtaining a synchronized network in a decentralized manner. This model is then applied to wireless ad hoc networks. To properly apply this model with an accuracy limited only to the propagation delay, a novel synchronization scheme, which is derived from the original firefly synchronization principle, is presented, and simulation results are given