On Distributed Computation in Noisy Random Planar Networks

The authors consider distributed or 'In-Network' computation of functions of sensing data in sensor networks in two dimensions. The sensor nodes collect sensing data and communicate with other nodes in a limited range over noisy wireless links. The authors' interest is in efficient evaluation of specific functions of sensing data. Latency, energy cost and throughput are the efficiency measures. They assume that communication costs dominate the time and energy cost for the computations. Two types of wireless networks are considered in the literature studying function computation - random planar networks and collocated or broadcast networks. Results for collocated networks are useful in solving corresponding problems for random planar networks.