Distributed Self-Stabilizing Capacitated Maximal Independent Set Construction in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of wireless self-organized sensor nodes connected through a wireless decentralized distributed network without the aid of a predefined infrastructure. Fault-tolerance and power management are fundamental challenges in WSNs. A WSN is self-stabilizing if it can initially start at any state and obtain a legitimate state in a finite time without any external intervention. Self-stabilization is an important method for providing fault-tolerance in WSNs. Maximal independent set (MIS) is an extensively used structure for many important applications such as clustering (Randhawa and Jain in Wirel Personal Commun 97(3):3355, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4674-5 ) and routing (Attea et al. in Wirel Personal Commun 81(2):819, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-014-2159-3 ; Lipinski in Wirel Personal Commun 101(1):251, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-018-5686-5 ) in WSNs. The capacitated MIS (CapMIS) problem is an extension of MIS in that each node has a capacity that determines the number of nodes it may dominate. In this paper, we propose a distributed self-stabilizing capacitated maximal independent set algorithm (CapMIS) in order to reduce energy consumption and support load balancing in WSNs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm in this manner. The algorithm is validated through theoretical analysis as well as testbed implementations and simulations.