Pulse coupled oscillators´ primitive for low complexity scheduling

Pulse coupled oscillators (PCOs) are pulsing devices that pulse individually in a periodic manner but alter their pulsing patterns in response to the pulsing of other nodes. A network of PCOs can produce a number of different dynamics from their pulsing activities, among which the synchrony of pulsing is perhaps the most well known. In this paper, we study the primitive that falls into the class of ldquodesynchronizationrdquo. Specifically, we propose a simple pulse-coupling mechanism that allows each node in the network to converge to a desynchronized state where the nodes will pulse periodically with a constant spacing among each others firing times. We discuss the convergence of the PCO mechanism and propose to apply this primitive to resolve contention in the reservation phase of a reservation-based MAC protocol.