Local leader election, signal strength aware flooding, and routeless routing

We have identified a fundamental operator in wireless networks that we named the local leader election in which the goal is to select a node in a spatially close neighborhood. We present a simple and efficient solution to the local leader election problem by making use of both: (i) implicit synchronization points, commonly observable by all nodes in the same neighborhood, and (ii) the prioritized backoff delay, dependent on the desired probability of each node becoming a leader. We then show that both flooding and routing are instances of the local leader election problem, so our general solution naturally applies. By relating the backoff delay to the signal strength of the received packet, we have designed a variant of flooding named signal strength aware flooding (SSAF) that can improve its efficiency. By using a different metric to derive the backoff delay, we have designed a new generation wireless routing protocol, that we named the routeless routing protocol that possesses several interesting properties.