An Orthodontics-inspired desynchronization algorithm for wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes an Orthodontics-inspired desynchronization algorithm for scheduling wireless sensor nodes to avoid conflicts on resource sharing by not accessing the resource at the same time. Applications of desynchronization include TDMA scheduling, wake-sleep scheduling, and collision avoiding. Although existing desynchronization approaches perform reasonably well, their errors highly fluctuate. This high fluctuation implies overshooting and results in high errors even after convergence. For smoother convergence and lower error, we design a mechanism analogous to an orthodontic teeth-alignment technique. In Orthodontics, an orthodontist prevents the already-correct-positioning teeth from moving by tying them with a power chain. We apply the similar concept to the existing desynchronization method to prevent nodes with correct phases from adjusting their time phases. We evaluate our implementation of DESYNC-ORT on TOSSIM, a simulator for wireless sensor networks. The simulation result indicates that our method significantly helps the existing desynchronization algorithm to converge smoothly with lower error (reducing approximately 20-60% of errors caused by existing approaches).