Interference-Resilient Information Exchange

• Main Authors: Newport, Calvin Charles (Contributor), Kowalski, Dariusz R. (Author), Guerraoui, Rachid (Author), Gilbert, Seth (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2010-05-04T19:00:59Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 This paper presents an efficient protocol for reliably exchanging information in a single-hop, multi-channel radio network subject to unpredictable interference. We model the interference by an adversary that can simultaneously disrupt up to t of the C available channels. We assume no shared secret keys or third-party infrastructure. The running time of our protocol depends on the gap between C and t: when the number of channels C = Q,(t[superscript 2]), the running time is linear; when only C = t +1 channels are available, the running time is exponential. We prove that exponential-time is unavoidable in the latter case. At the core of our protocol lies a combinatorial function, possibly of independent interest, described for the first time in this paper: the multi-selector. A multi-selector generates a sequence of channel assignments for each device such that every sufficiently large subset of devices is partitioned onto distinct channels by at least one of these assignments.