Time estimation of a ring-based bootstrapping protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Bootstrapping is one of the most crucial issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) especially at the case of ring-based protocols where all the nodes should be placed into one global consistent ring. Recent approaches are unable to form directly one global ring. They form as a first step multiple rings, then add an additional step to fuse all the rings into one global consistent ring. We have proposed in a recent work a solution that avoids the formation of separated rings and forms directly one global consistent ring by orchestrating the nodes joining process and avoiding concurrent joining. In this paper, we investigate the following problem: Since our bootstrapping approach has multiple sequential steps whose durations are ensured by timers, we should estimate the maximal duration of each step in order to optimize the total time needed to reach the steady state.