Subject: [6lowpan] Trickle

From: Philip Levis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:58:46 +0100

I'm sorry I couldn't make the 6lowpan meeting today; I was over at  
alto. Jonathan mentioned that a lot of people were interested in  
Trickle. Luckily, the July issue of CACM has it as a research  
highlight. This means it's a 7-page paper written for a larger  
audience. I'm happy to answer any questions people have about it. It's  
a research highlight because it's been in heavy use for about five  
years now in the TinyOS community, and so was not only a big splash  
when it came out but has also held up to the test of time. Here's the  
URL:

http://mags.acm.org/communications/200807/

You want the article entitled "The Emergence of a Networking Primitive  
in Wireless Sensor Networks."

The basic thrust of it is Trickle is a way to establish eventual  
consistency quickly, cheaply, and with excellent (logarithmic) scaling  
properties. This is the abstract of the paper:

"The wireless sensor network community approached networking  
abstractions as an open question, allowing answers to emerge with time  
and experience.  The Trickle algorithm has become a basic mechanism  
used in numerous protocols and systems. Trickle brings nodes to  
eventual consistency quickly and efficiently while remaining  
remarkably robust to variations in network density, topology, and  
dynamics. Instead of flooding a network with packets, Trickle uses a
``polite gossip'' policy to control send rates so each node hears just  
enough packets to stay consistent. This simple mechanism enables  
Trickle to scale to thousand-fold changes in network density, reach  
consistency in seconds, and require only a few bytes of state yet  
impose a maintenance cost of a few sends an hour. Originally designed  
for disseminating new code, experience has shown Trickle to have much  
broader applicability, including route maintenance and neighbor  
discovery. This paper provides an overview of the research challenges  
wireless sensor networks face, describes the Trickle algorithm, and  
outlines several ways it is used today."

Phil
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