Efficient Gossip Computations in Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider the implementation issues that arise in gossip-based distributed average consensus (DAC) algorithms for wireless sensor networks (WSN) with nodes operating at low duty cycles (1-5%). Gossip protocols provide a robust mechanism to handle the unreliability in communication arising due to the dynamic nature of WSNs. We present a practical implementation with improvements over simple gossip protocol that achieves DAC in low duty cycle WSNs. Our implementation deals with problems due to deployment, neighbor discovery, scheduling, convergence detection, and adaptability in a dynamic and changing WSN. Our implementation uses the Castalia simulation framework but it can be adapted to any other simulation framework or other WSN platform. We show that the proposed implementation techniques effectively solve these problems and demonstrate significant performance improvements for practical distributed consensus.