Solving the Distributed Trigger Counting Problem without Any Global Assumption

The distributed trigger counting (DTC) problem is to raise an alert while the number of triggers received by the system reaches a pre-specified amount. Particularly, there have been several algorithms proposed to solve the DTC problem in the literature. However, these existing algorithms are all under the assumption that each node knows what kind of topology the whole system is as well as what kind of role it plays in the system. Obviously, such an assumption is not practical in wireless sensor networks since the topology of a wireless sensor network cannot be known in advance. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm to solve the DTC problem without any global assumption. Moreover, we further reduce the message complexity of the foregoing algorithm, and then propose a more message-efficient version, which is still not based on any global assumption.