Pulse coupled oscillators' primitives for collision-free multiple access with application to body area networks

This paper investigates strategies to achieve collectively coordination in sensor networks, with extremely limited complexity. We propose and compare novel backoff mechanisms to achieve adaptively the desired scheduling among a number of sensors that contend for their access to the wireless medium. The method considered models the interactions among sensors as that of pulse coupled oscillators (PCO), which have been widely studied in mathematical biology to capture the interaction among biological entities (such as neurons) and the emergence of firing patterns in their networks. Modeling our sensors as UWB pulse emitters, our interest in this paper is to discuss strategies that allow the sensors to interleave their pulsing activities in a sequence so as to provide a frame subdivision for the collision free transmissions. The bio-inspired algorithm featured is a useful network primitive for multiple access in highly scalable sensor networks, which adds on to the well known primitive for network synchronization where PCO models are popular for.