2008/06/11 by Ted Herman, Herman, Ted, Morten Mjelde +1
Computer Science · Engineering · #C.2.4 #C.3 #D.1.3 #Distributed #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #Operating Systems (cs.OS) #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) #cs.DC #cs.OS
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0806.1768
19 pages, 16 figures (using pstricks)
arxiv created 2008/06/11 · openalex publication_date 2008/06/11 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Designing protocols and formulating convenient programming units of abstraction for sensor networks is challenging due to communication errors and platform constraints. This paper investigates properties and implementation reliability for a local read-write abstraction. Local read-write is inspired by the class of read-modify-write operations defined for shared-memory multiprocessor architectures. The class of read-modify-write operations is important in solving consensus and related synchronization problems for concurrency control. Local read-write is shown to be an atomic abstraction for synchronizing neighborhood states in sensor networks. The paper compares local read-write to similar lightweight operations in wireless sensor networks, such as read-all, write-all, and a transaction-based abstraction: for some optimistic scenarios, local read-write is a more efficient neighborhood operation. A partial implementation is described, which shows that three outcomes characterize operation response: success, failure, and cancel. A failure response indicates possible inconsistency for the operation result, which is the result of a timeout event at the operation's initiator. The paper presents experimental results on operation performance with different timeout values and situations of no contention, with some tests also on various neighborhood sizes.