How many are you (an approach for the smart dust world)?

As the size and cost of embedded devices continue to decrease, it becomes economically feasible to densely deploy networks with very large quantities of such nodes, and thus enabling the implementation of networks with increasingly larger number of nodes becomes a relevant problem. In this paper we describe a novel algorithm to obtain the number of live nodes with a very low time-complexity. In particular, we develop a mechanism to estimate the number of nodes or the number of proposed values (COUNT), with a time complexity that increases sublinearly with the number of nodes. The approach we propose is based on the wise exploitation of dominance-based protocols and offers excellent scalability properties for emerging applications in dense Cyber Physical Systems.