A distributed probabilistic arbitration in sensors integration

We model an important aspect of the problem of sensor information integration that arises in wireless communications, where N sensors try to communicate with a receiver using a single un-shareable radio channel. If several sensors transmit at the same time their transmissions collide at the receiver resulting in garbled messages and the need for re-transmission. This is highly undesirable since the sensor nodes are energy-constrained and the radio interface is known to be the most significant source of energy expenditure. Consequently, it is of paramount importance to design arbitration protocols that are highly efficient in stamping out collisions and are, at the same time, as lightweight as possible. The main contribution of this paper is to present a distributed probabilistic mechanism that aims to arbitrate between several competing requests by sensor nodes for the radio channel. Our mechanism is simple, energy-efficient and does not rely on the existence of unique sensor identifiers (IDs).