Poster Abstract: Agreement for Wireless Sensor Networks under External Interference

Wireless sensor nodes often need to agree on fun damental pieces of information: at the MAC layer, sensor nodes may need to agree on a new time slot or frequency channel; at -40 the application layer they may need to agree on handing over -60 a leader role from one node to another. With the increasing -80 congestion of the unregulated ISM frequencies, the quality of communications deteriorates, leading to packet loss and higher latencies that may break agreement in two different ways: none of the nodes agree on the new information (time slot, frequency channel) and stick with the previous state, or – even worse – some nodes agree on the new information and some do not. In this work, we propose a protocol that exploits jamming instead of message transmissions to confirm the reception of a packet. We show that, in the presence of common interference patterns, this approach outperforms packet-based handshake protocols in terms of both agreement probability and energy consumption.