I'm sorry I couldn't make the 6lowpan meeting today; I was over at
alto. Jonathan mentioned that a lot of people were interested in
Trickle. Luckily, the July issue of CACM has it as a research
highlight. This means it's a 7-page paper written for a larger
audience. I'm happy to answer any questions people have about it. It's
a research highlight because it's been in heavy use for about five
years now in the TinyOS community, and so was not only a big splash
when it came out but has also held up to the test of time. Here's the
URL:
http://mags.acm.org/communications/200807/
You want the article entitled "The Emergence of a Networking Primitive
in Wireless Sensor Networks."
The basic thrust of it is Trickle is a way to establish eventual
consistency quickly, cheaply, and with excellent (logarithmic) scaling
properties. This is the abstract of the paper:
"The wireless sensor network community approached networking
abstractions as an open question, allowing answers to emerge with time
and experience. The Trickle algorithm has become a basic mechanism
used in numerous protocols and systems. Trickle brings nodes to
eventual consistency quickly and efficiently while remaining
remarkably robust to variations in network density, topology, and
dynamics. Instead of flooding a network with packets, Trickle uses a
``polite gossip'' policy to control send rates so each node hears just
enough packets to stay consistent. This simple mechanism enables
Trickle to scale to thousand-fold changes in network density, reach
consistency in seconds, and require only a few bytes of state yet
impose a maintenance cost of a few sends an hour. Originally designed
for disseminating new code, experience has shown Trickle to have much
broader applicability, including route maintenance and neighbor
discovery. This paper provides an overview of the research challenges
wireless sensor networks face, describes the Trickle algorithm, and
outlines several ways it is used today."
Phil
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