A(2)-Trickle: Adaptive & Aligned Trickle for Rapid and Reliable Dissemination in Low-Power Wireless Networks

Abstract

Trickle is a scalable and robust flooding algorithm designed for low-power multihop wireless networks. It aims to reduce redundant packet transmissions and collisions while maintaining information consistency, and has been popular due to its simple yet efficient operation on most general topologies. However, Trickle fails to achieve reliability and low latency under certain, but not uncommon, scenarios. To tackle this problem, we propose A(2)-Trickle, a light-weight enhancement to the Trickle algorithm that guarantees rapid and reliable dissemination under any topology. A(2)-Trickle aligns the interval boundary at propagation times without synchronizing the global clock, and adapts to the network topology for nodes that could suffer from Trickle's naive suppression mechanism. A(2)-Trickle is implemented on a real embedded device and is evaluated in various scenarios and topologies through both testbed experiments and simulations. The results reveal that A(2)-Trickle adapts to the network and enables faster and more energy-efficient dissemination while maintaining >99% reliability.