Reducing Collision Probability in Wireless Sensor Network Backoff-Based Election Mechanisms

Wireless Sensor Networks have inherent constraints such as available bandwidth and energy. Communication protocols applying to those kind of networks need to be localized and distributed. When such a protocol needs to discriminate between several neighbor nodes (for example, the node with most remaining energy), an efficient approach is to ask the neighbors to encode information in backoff timers (in our example, the consumed energy), and respond to a question after having waited for the resulting duration. The node which answers first is elected. Whereas this technique is stateless and efficient, its inherent drawback is that response messages can collide. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a backoff function to alleviate this problem. Analytical results are presented, and confirmed using extensive simulations.