Towards a self-organizing stochastic-communications paradigm for wireless ad-hoc/sensor networks

We introduce a self-organizing stochastic-communications scheme, called BSTeR, for wireless ad-hoc/sensor networks (mobile or stationary). The introduced scheme involves three ideas essentially: 1) Each node i determines its transmit power dynamically according to a random variable P_i; 2) Node i computes the Probability Mass Function (PMF) of P_i, based on the topology of the network and the PMFs of other nodes in the network dynamically; and 3) Each time node i needs to transmit a data packet, it generates a random number pi_i according to P_i, and transmits the data with power level pi_i. Compared to the widely employed fixed-power communication schemes, the introduced scheme provides significant performance gains over many performance aspects concurrently, including network connectivity, end-to-end power/energy consumption, end-to-end delay and throughput, energy-delay relation, system longevity, and coverage.