Exploring design tradeoffs of a distributed algorithm for cosmic ray event detection

Abstract

Many sensor networks, including large particle detector arraysmeasuring high-energy cosmic-ray air showers, traditionally rely oncentralised trigger algorithms to find spatial and temporal coincidencesof individual nodes. Such schemes suffer from scalability problems, especially ifthe nodes communicate wirelessly or have bandwidth limitations.However, nodes which instead communicate with each other can, inprinciple, use a distributed algorithm to find coincident eventsthemselves without communication with a central node. We present such analgorithm and consider various design tradeoffs involved, in the context of apotential trigger for the Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA).