Distributed averaging in wireless sensor networks under an ALOHA-like communication protocol

Distributed averaging is a fundamental tool for inference in wireless sensor networks; it builds on the exchange of messages between nodes to achieve consensus. Practical implementations of distributed averaging require a communication protocol that manages the message exchange. We propose a simple asynchronous ALOHA-like protocol that requires no node coordination and applies to any averaging scheme that tolerates link failures. We analytically characterize the collisions occurring with this protocol and we provide numerical performance results for asynchronous distributed averaging under the proposed protocol.