Self-organization of wireless networks through declarative local communication

Abstract

The use of declarative query languages has been proposed recently to express communication protocols. This approach, known as declarative networking, is very promising since it results in very simple programs, which are very easy to use. In this paper, we pursue this approach and show how to express the FISCO protocol using less than 40 simple declarative rules. FISCO was designed for self-configuration and self-organisation of large scale multi-hop wireless networks. The declarative modeling of FISCO has important practical and theoretical consequences. First of all, it results in an implementation much more compact than the initial one which used several thousands code lines, it is easy to use and modify, and enjoys verifiable properties, such as correctness and termination. Second, since FISCO targets large scale networks, its scalability is its first requirement. We show that the good scalability of this protocol follows from the fact that it relies mainly on local distributed processes, which can be expressed using first-order queries. Unlike previous proposals for declarative networking which rely on recursive query languages, we show that first-order queries thus offer a high potential for network protocols. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.