Energy efficient alert in single-hop networks of extremely weak devices

We present an alert algorithm for single-hop radio networks with polylogarithmic time complexity and sublogarithmic energy complexity. Our algorithm works correctly with high probability regardless of the number of stations that try to broadcast an alert signal. Moreover, we show that it can be made fairly robust against node failures. We show a lower bound for energy cost that matches the energy cost of our algorithm. Our solution has very weak computing, communication and storage requirements. Moreover the behavior of almost all devices is almost oblivious. Therefore, the algorithm can be applied for a system containing extremely weak devices. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.