Desynchronization with an artificial force field for wireless networks

Desynchronization is useful for scheduling nodes to perform tasks at different time. This property is desirable for resource sharing, TDMA scheduling, and collision avoiding. Inspired by robotic circular formation, we propose DWARF (Desynchronization With an ARtificial Force field), a novel technique for desynchronization in wireless networks. Each neighboring node has artificial forces to repel other nodes to perform tasks at different time phases. Nodes with closer time phases have stronger forces to repel each other in the time domain. Each node adjusts its time phase proportionally to its received forces. Once the received forces are balanced, nodes are desynchronized. We evaluate our implementation of DWARF on TOSSIM, a simulator for wireless sensor networks. The simulation results indicate that DWARF incurs significantly lower desynchronization error and scales much better than existing approaches.