Can Uncoordinated Beeps tell Stories?
Fabien Dufoulon, Janna Burman, Joffroy Beauquier · 2020
The beeping model is an extremely restrictive communication model. Nodes communicate in discrete rounds using beeps---simple bursts of energy---and carrier sensing. Simultaneous beeps produce (nondestructive) collisions, resulting in information loss. Such communication differs greatly from the traditional communication mechanisms in distributed systems, like message-passing or shared memory. Indeed, a beep is a unary signal that communicates no information (e.g., no message content, nor sender information) beyond its own presence. As a result, in a round of beeping communication, hearing a beep means only that some (unknown) neighboring node is communicating in this very round, whereas silence (i.e., hearing no beeps) means only that no neighboring node is communicating.