Star-Node Identification in Self-Organising Wireless Networks

Self-configuring, hierarchical, ad hoc, wireless networks are fast becoming the focus of research for spectral efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. Such networks can be considered as graphs where a node represents a transceiving unit and an edge represents a communication link between two nodes. In order to probabilistically analyse connectedness issues in such graphs, the concept of the star-node is introduced here, where a star-node is a node whose path loss to multiple nodes in its vicinity falls below a given threshold, i.e., it is capable of sustaining "healthy" communication links to multiple neighbours. Star-nodes are important in the context of ad hoc and sensor networks since nodes in a self-configuring network must be able to identify their neighbours, i.e., those nodes with which viable communication links can be established. The probability of finding such star-nodes is analytically derived for a uniform user distribution in a circular scenario. The theory is tested against Monte Carlo simulations and a very good match has been found.