On the Scalability of Constructive Interference in Low-Power Wireless Networks

12th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN 2015). 9 to 11, Feb, 2015. Porto, Portugal

Constructive baseband interference has been recently introduced in low-power wireless networks as a promising technique enabling low-latency network flooding and sub-microsecond time synchronisation among network nodes. The scalability of this technique has been questioned in regards to the maximum temporalmisalignment among baseband signals, due to the variety of path delays in thenetwork. By contrast, we find that the scalability is compromised, in the firstplace, by emerging fast fading in the composite channel, which originates in thecarrier frequency disparity of the participating repeaters nodes. We investigatethe multisource wave problem and show the resulting signal becomes vulnerablein the presence of noise, leading to significant deterioration of the link whenever the carriers have similar amplitudes.