EBS: Decentralised Slot Synchronisation for Broadcast messaging for Low-power Wireless Embedded Systems

In this paper, we present a decentralised scheme that facilitates reliable network wide broadcast messaging without the requirement of strict time synchronisation, for duty-cycled low-power wireless embedded systems. In this emergent broadcast slot (EBS) scheme, devices coordinate their wake-up periods with their neighbours to exchange schedule information locally. This leads to the emergence of local slot synchronisation without the need for either network-wide synchronisation or a centralised time synchronisation element. We theoretically show that this scheme converges faster than similar emergent and gradient-based approaches, which we confirm by evaluation on real test-beds. We also show that our scheme exhibits lower overheads while being more tolerant to disturbances caused by faulty nodes, wireless link failures, contention and interference in presence of deterministic propagation delays.