Resilient Desynchronization for Decentralized Medium Access Control

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), equally spaced timing for Medium Access Control (MAC) is fundamental to guarantee throughput maximization from all nodes. This motivated the so called desynchronization problem and its solution based on the fast Nesterov method. In this letter, we tackle the problem of constructing centralized and distributed versions of the optimal fixed-parameter Nesterov that are resilient to attacks to a subset of nodes. By showing a relationship between the variance of the attacker signal and how further away a node is, we are able to present a distributed algorithm that has minimal added complexity and performs the detection and isolation of the faulty node. Simulations are provided illustrating the successful detection and highlighting that without a correction mechanism (dependent on additional assumptions), there is a residual error that is not eliminated.