Broadcasting in an unreliable SINR model

Summary

We investigate distributed algorithms for broadcasting in unreliable wireless networks. Our basic setting is the signal to noise and interference ratio (SINR) model, which captures the physical key characteristics of wireless communication. We consider a dynamic variant of this model in which an adversary can adaptively control the model parameters for each individual transmission. Moreover, we assume that the network devices have no information about the geometry or the topology of the network and do neither know the exact model parameters nor do they have any control over them. Our model is intended to capture the inherently unstable and unreliable nature of real wireless transmission, where signal quality and reception depends on many different aspects that are often hard to measure or predict. We show that with moderate adaptations, the broadcast algorithm of Daum et al. [DISC 13] also works in such an adversarial, much more dynamic setting. The algorithm allows to broadcast a single message in a network of size n in time O(D·polylog(n+R)), where D is the diameter and R describes the granularity of the communication graph.