On Distributed Time-Dependent Shortest Paths over Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

We revisit the shortest path problem in asynchronous duty-cycled wireless sensor networks, which exhibit time-dependent features. We model the time-varying link cost and distance from each node to the sink as periodic functions. We show that the time-cost function satisfies the FIFO property, which makes the time-dependent shortest path problem solvable in polynomial-time. Using the ß-synchronizer, we propose a fast distributed algorithm to build all-to-one shortest paths with polynomial message complexity and time complexity. The algorithm determines the shortest paths for all discrete times with a single execution, in contrast with multiple executions needed by previous solutions. We further propose an efficient distributed algorithm for time-dependent shortest path maintenance. The proposed algorithm is loop-free with low message complexity and low space complexity of O(maxdeg), where maxdeg is the maximum degree for all nodes. The performance of our solution is evaluated under diverse network configurations. The results suggest that our algorithm is more efficient than previous solutions in terms of message complexity and space complexity.