Study on multi-phases collaboration method for RF-sensor networks

In this paper we study the problem of collaboration in RF-Sensor networks, comprised of a large number of very small and low cost nodes, capable of sensing, communicating and computing. The Multi-phases Collaboration of such nodes may lead to the accomplishment of large sensing tasks, having useful applications in practice. First, we research two collaboration methods, one is no collaboration and the other is local collaboration. We show that local collaboration achieves logarithmic growth rate for the transport traffic with the network size whereas the schedule length growth rate remains linear. Next, we analyze a two-phase collaboration method which localizes collaboration within regions of the network in an attempt to assess the performance of methods bounded by the two aforementioned extremes. Finally, we extend two-phase collaboration to a multi-phase collaboration method where the number of phases depends on the number of nodes and the size of the collaboration set.