Large-scale networked systems: from anarchy to geometric self-structuring

Self-structuring in large-scale networked systems refers to the ability of the participating entities to collaboratively impose a geometric structure to the network. This structure might lead to a geographic organization of nodes or a functional structuring where participating entities get assigned a specific function in the network. Yet, self-structuring is extremely hard to achieve when no global information about the network is available. In this paper, we present the design and the evaluation of a fully decentralized and robust geometric self-structuring approach relying solely on local observation of neighboring connections for sensor networks. This approach heavily relies on the ability of each node to estimate its position in the network, with respect to other nodes. This refers to assigning virtual coordinates to participating nodes. The contribution of the paper is twofold: (i) a simple lightweight and fully decentralized virtual coordinated system (VINCOS) is proposed, relying only on local connectivity information and per-neighbor communication. This is to oppose to most existing approaches relying either on pre-defined positioning referential or signal measurement; (ii) the design and evaluation of a network geometric self-structuring approach (NetGeoS) is presented that enables a large set of nodes to configure themselves in arbitrary geometric structures. The evaluation demonstrates that the approach is both efficient and accurate while achieving the geometric structuring