বৃহস্পতিবার, ১৪ জুন, ২০১২

New algorithm breaks bottlenecks

As sensors that do things like detect touch and motion in cell phones get smaller, cheaper, and more reliable, computer manufacturers are beginning to take seriously the decade-old idea of “smart dust”—networks of tiny wireless devices that permeate the environment, monitoring everything from the structural integrity of buildings and bridges to the activity of live volcanoes. In order for such networks to make collective decisions, however, they need to integrate information gathered by hundreds or thousands of devices.
But networks of cheap sensors scattered in punishing and protean environments are prone to “bottlenecks,” regions of sparse connectivity that all transmitted data must pass through in order to reach the whole network. Keren Censor-Hillel, a postdoc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Hadas Shachnai of Technion—Israel Institute of Technology presented a new algorithm that handles bottlenecks much more effectively than its predecessors.
The algorithm is designed to work in so-called ad hoc networks, in which no one device acts as superintendent, overseeing the network as a whole. In a network of cheap wireless sensors, for instance, any given device could fail: its battery could die; its signal could be obstructed; it could even be carried off by a foraging animal. The network has to be able to adjust to any device’s disappearance, which means that no one device can have too much responsibility.

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