Efficient network flooding and time synchronization with Glossy

TLDR

The paper introduces Glossy, a new flooding architecture for wireless sensor networks. Glossy achieves fast flooding and implicit time synchronization by exploiting constructive interference of IEEE 802.15.4 symbols, enforcing a timing requirement that allows concurrent transmissions to interfere constructively, and temporally decoupling flooding from other network activities. Experiments show Glossy floods packets in a few milliseconds, achieves sub‑microsecond synchronization error, delivers >99.99 % packet reception probability with only a few milliseconds of radio activity, and its performance is independent of node density.

Abstract

This paper presents Glossy, a novel flooding architecture for wireless sensor networks. Glossy exploits constructive interference of IEEE 802.15.4 symbols for fast network flooding and implicit time synchronization. We derive a timing requirement to make concurrent transmissions of the same packet interfere constructively, allowing a receiver to decode the packet even in the absence of capture effects. To satisfy this requirement, our design temporally decouples flooding from other network activities. We analyze Glossy using a mixture of statistical and worst-case models, and evaluate it through experiments under controlled settings and on three wireless sensor testbeds. Our results show that Glossy floods packets within a few milliseconds and achieves an average time synchronization error below one microsecond. In most cases, a node receives the flooding packet with a probability higher than 99.99 %, while having its radio turned on for only a few milliseconds during a flood. Moreover, unlike existing flooding schemes, Glossy's performance exhibits no noticeable dependency on node density, which facilitates its application in diverse real-world settings.