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Upper and lower bounds for deterministic broadcast in powerline communication networks

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Abstract

Powerline communication networks assume an interesting position in the communication network space: similarly to wireless networks, powerline networks are based on a shared broadcast medium; unlike wireless networks, however, the signal propagation is constrained to the power lines of the electrical infrastructure, which is essentially a graph. This article presents an algorithmic model to study the design of communication services over powerline communication networks. As a case study, we focus on the fundamental broadcast problem, and present and analyze a distributed algorithm \(\textsc {Color}\textsc {Cast}\) which terminates in at most n communication rounds, where n denotes the network size, even in a model where link qualities are unpredictable and time-varying. For comparison, the achieved broadcast time is lower than what can be achieved by any unknown-topology algorithm (lower bounds \(\varOmega (n\log n / \log (n/D))\) and \(\varOmega (n \log D)\) are proved in Kowalski and Pelc (Distrib Comput 18(1):43–57, 2005) resp. Clementi et al. (2001) where D is the network diameter). Moreover, existing known-topology broadcast algorithms often fail to deliver the broadcast message entirely in this model. This article also presents a general broadcast lower bound for the powerline model.

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Notes

  1. For other models, mostly targeted at low voltage use cases and for communication channel models, we refer to [5, 6, 28, 31, 32].

  2. Concurrent transmissions might lead to interference and prevent correct message reception. This case is treated in the subsequent section.

  3. We do not assume that we can always predict what happens if there are multiple concurrent senders in range. It depends on the received signal strengths and the available hardware if messages can be decoded in this case. Complexity-wise it is harder to solve problems in this model. See also the discussion on http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/p_bgi.html.

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Acknowledgments

Stefan Schmid and Gilles Tredan are supported by the French-German PROCOPE program. This research is partially funded by the Secured Virtual Cloud (SVC) project of the French program Investissements d’Avenir on Cloud Computing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ABB Corporate Research, Zurich, Switzerland

    Yvonne Anne Pignolet

  2. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Stefan Schmid

  3. CNRS-LAAS, Toulouse, France

    Gilles Tredan

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  1. Yvonne Anne Pignolet
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  2. Stefan Schmid
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  3. Gilles Tredan
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Correspondence to Stefan Schmid.

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Pignolet, Y.A., Schmid, S. & Tredan, G. Upper and lower bounds for deterministic broadcast in powerline communication networks. Distrib. Comput. 29, 239–250 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-016-0263-1

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