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RETRI in other contexts

The idea of using RETRI, exemplified in our address-free fragmentation, has applications in other areas of a distributed sensor network. These applications all have in common a need to reference some state that has meaning over some time period and in some location. Each application's transaction density is affected by the temporal and spatial extent over which this state must remain valid. The definition of a transaction and the method of detection of collisions are both highly application-dependent.

A number of other examples are seen in sensor networks, described in more detail in [6], including:

Although identifier conflicts can lead to losses or unexpected behavior, robustness to these types of errors must already be fundamental to the design of these systems, where errors are the norm due to factors such as node dynamics, changes in the environment, and the vagaries of RF connectivity. Occasional identifier collisions will have a small marginal effect, and persistent or systematic collisions are avoided by picking a new identifier for each new transaction.


next up previous
Next: Related work Up: Random, Ephemeral Transaction Identifiers Previous: Implementation