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The Power of Synchronisation: Formal Analysis of Power Consumption in Networks of Pulse-Coupled Oscillators

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2018)

Abstract

Nature-inspired synchronisation protocols have been widely adopted to achieve consensus within wireless sensor networks. We analyse the power consumption of such protocols, particularly the energy required to synchronise all nodes across a network. We use the model of bio-inspired, pulse-coupled oscillators to achieve network-wide synchronisation and provide an extended formal model of just such a protocol, enhanced with structures for recording energy usage. Exhaustive analysis is then carried out through formal verification, utilising the PRISM model-checker to calculate the resources consumed on each possible system execution. This allows us to investigate a range of parameter instantiations and the trade-offs between power consumption and time to synchronise. This provides a principled basis for the formal analysis of a broader range of large-scale network protocols.

This work was supported by the Sir Joseph Rotblat Alumni Scholarship at Liverpool, the EPSRC Research Programme EP/N007565/1 Science of Sensor Systems Software and the EPSRC Research Grant EP/L024845/1 Verifiable Autonomy. The authors would like to thank the Networks Sciences and Technology Initiative (NeST) of the University of Liverpool for the use of their computing facilities and David Shield for the corresponding technical support.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The scripts, along with the verification results, can be found at https://github.com/PaulGainer/mc-bio-synch/tree/master/energy-analysis.

  2. 2.

    While most individual model checking runs finished within a minute, the cumulative model checking time over all analysed models was very large. The results shown in Fig. 3a already amount to 80 distinct runs.

  3. 3.

    Within Prism this can be achieved by using the filter construct.

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Gainer, P., Linker, S., Dixon, C., Hustadt, U., Fisher, M. (2018). The Power of Synchronisation: Formal Analysis of Power Consumption in Networks of Pulse-Coupled Oscillators. In: Sun, J., Sun, M. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11232. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02450-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02450-5_10

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