Synchronous transmissions enable simple yet accurate protocol modeling

Traditional low-power wireless protocols maintain distributed network state to cope with link dynamics. Modeling the protocol operation as a function of network state is difficult as the state is frequently updated in an uncoordinated fashion. Recent protocols use synchronous transmissions (ST): multiple nodes send simultaneously towards the same receiver, as opposed to pairwise link-based transmissions (LT). ST enable efficient multi-hop protocols with little network state. We studied whether ST in Glossy enable simple yet accurate protocol modeling [10]. Based on extensive testbed experiments and statistical analyses, we found that: (i) unlike LT, packet receptions and losses with ST largely adhere to a sequence of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Bernoulli trials; (ii) this property greatly simplifies accurately modeling ST-based protocols, as we demonstrated by obtaining model errors below 0.25% in energy for the Glossy-based Low-Power Wireless Bus (LWB).