The paper "Network On or Off? Instant Global Binary Decisions over UWB with Flick" by Enrico Soprana, Matteo Trobinger, Davide Vecchia and Gian Pietro Picco received the Best Paper Award at the 22th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2023), held in San Antonio (Texas, US) on May 9-12, 2023. The first author, Enrico Soprana, is a 1st year PhD student at IECS Doctoral School supervised by prof. Picco; the work is actually based on his M.Sc. thesis.
The article presents Flick, an innovative networking protocol that can establish a global binary decision quickly, reliably, and efficiently. “For instance, it can be used by nodes to instantaneously agree whether the network should remain active or enter sleep, just as easy and fast as flicking a switch” says prof. Picco.
Several other applications of the concept exist. The team evaluated Flick over a 78-node network in Cloves, a large-scale, public UWB testbed available at DISI Department showing that, e.g., a single node can globally flick the switch across a 10-hop diameter in < 500 μs with minimal energy consumption and near-perfect reliability. Key to the design of Flick and its impressive performance is the innovative use of the preamble of a packet instead of its full content as the means of dissemination of binary data.
IPSN is a flagship conference (CORE A*) at the intersection of networked embedded sensing, control, and systems design. This is the fourth IPSN best paper award by prof. Picco’s team, along with those received in 2009, 2011, and 2015.
Keywords: ultra-wideband, concurrent transmissions, low-power wireless