Power-Aware Population Protocols

In this paper, we propose a formal energy model which allows an analytical study of energy consumption, for the first time in the context of population protocols (PP). In PP, anonymous and bounded memory agents move unpredictably and communicate in pairs. In order to illustrate the power and the usefulness of the proposed energy model, we develop a new power-aware protocol (EB-TTFM) for the task of data collection. The analytical results show that, in terms of energy consumption, EB-TTFM outperforms a known data collection protocol under certain conditions. Finally, we present a lower bound concerning energy consumption of any possible data collection protocol in PP, which also justifies the efficiency of EB-TTFM.