Decentralized Slicing in Mobile Low-Power Wireless Networks

The slicing problem is to partition a partially-ordered collection of values into a given number of totally-ordered disjoint sets - slices - so that each slice contains a predefined fraction of values that are greater than those in the previous slice and smaller than those in the next slice. In this paper, we investigate a decentralized variant of the problem, which we encountered in our experiments with wearable low-power wireless devices. In this variant of the problem, each mobile device has a local value and, by opportunistically communicating with other devices, has to autonomously assign itself to an appropriate slice, depending on how its value compares to the values of others. We propose an algorithmic framework for this setting, within which we investigate several techniques that can potentially be employed to solve the slicing problem. We then empirically study the advantages and drawbacks of such solutions in low-level simulations and on a testbed of 80 low-power wireless devices.