A sleep-awake protocol for information propagation in smart dust networks

Smart dust is a set of a vast number of ultra-small fully autonomous computing and communication devices, with very restricted energy and computing capabilities, that co-operate to quickly and efficiently accomplish a large sensing task. Smart dust can be very useful in practice i.e. in the local detection of a remote crucial event and the propagation of data reporting its realization. In this work we continue our effort towards the research on smart dust from a basic algorithmic point of view. Under a simple but realistic model for smart dust we present an interesting problem, which is how to propagate efficiently information on an event detected locally. Then we present anew smart dust protocol, which we call the "Sleep-Awake" protocol, for information propagation that explicitly uses the energy saving features (i.e. the alteration of sleeping and awake time periods) of the smart dust particles. By using both some simple probabilistic analysis and extensive experiments, we provide some first concrete results for the success probability and the time and energy efficiency of the protocol, in terms of parameters of the smart dust network. We note that the study of the interplay of these parameters allows us to program the smart dust network characteristics accordingly.