Energy-efficient initialization protocols for radio networks with no collision detection

A radio network (RN, for short) is a distributed system consisting of n radio stations. The initialization problem is to assign each of the n stations of the RN a unique ID. The initialization problem is non-trivial since the stations are assumed to be indistinguishable. The main contribution of this work is to propose energy-efficient randomized initialization protocols for RNs lacking collision detection capabilities. We show that if the number n of stations is known beforehand, the single-channel RN can be initialized by a protocol that terminates, with probability exceeding 1 - 1/n, in O(n) time slots, with no station being awake for more than O(log log n) time slots.