Distributed Latency-Efficient Beaconing for Multi-channel 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 a 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 in networks, 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 firstly formulated and proved to be NP-hard. To avoid the collisions locally, several special structures are designed, which works in \(O(\varDelta )\) time, where \(\varDelta \) denotes the maximum node degree in the network. Then, a distributed beaconing scheduling method which can compute a low-latency and collision-free schedule is proposed with a theoretical bounded, 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.