Jam-X: Wireless Agreement under Interference

Abstract: Wireless low-power transceivers used in sensor networks such as IEEE 802.15.4 typically operate in unlicensed frequency bands that are subject to external interference from devices transmitting at much higher power. Communication protocols should therefore be designed to be robust against such interference. A critical building block of many protocols at all layers is agreement on a piece of information among a set of nodes. At the MAC layer, nodes may need to agree on a new time slot or frequency channel; at the application layer nodes may need to agree on handing over a leader role from one node to another. Message loss caused by interference may break agreement in two different ways: none of the nodes use the new information (time slot, channel, leader) and stick with the previous assignment, or - even worse - some nodes use the new information and some do not. This may lead to reduced performance or failures. In this paper we investigate the problem of agreement under interference and point out the limitations of the traditional message-based n-way handshake approach. We propose novel protocols that use jamming instead of message transmissions and show that they outperform the n-way handshake in terms of agreement probability, energy consumption, and time-to-completion both in the unicast case (two neighboring nodes agree) as well as in the broadcast case (any number of neighboring nodes agree).