Distributed and latency-aware beaconing for asynchronous duty-cycled IoT networks

Beaconing is a fundamental task in IoT networks, where each node tries to locally broadcast a packet to all its neighbors. Unfortunately, the problem of Minimum Latency Beaconing Schedule (MLBS), which tries to obtain the fastest and collision-free schedule, is not well studied when the IoT devices employ the duty-cycled working mode. The existing works have rigid assumptions that there exists a single channel and can only work in a centralized fashion. Aiming at making the work more practical and general, in this paper, we investigate the first distributed method for the MLBS problem in Multi-channel asynchronous Duty-cycled IoT networks (MLBSMD problem). The MLBSMD problem is first formulated and proved to be NP-hard. To avoid collisions locally, several special structures are designed which can work in \(\varvec{O}(\varvec{\Delta }^{2})\) $\mathit{O}({\mathbf{\Delta }}^2)$ time, where \(\varvec{\Delta }\) $\mathbf{\Delta }$ denotes the maximum node degree in the network. Then, a distributed beaconing scheduling method that can compute a low-latency and collision-free schedule is proposed with a theoretical bound, taking the active time slots of each node into account. Finally, the extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of latency.