Fault Tolerant Topology Control with Unreliable Failure Detectors

Wireless ad-hoc networking has emerged as its own discipline over the past decade and topology control is an important problem in such networks. The aim of topology control is to construct an appropriate topology to improve the efficiency and performance of the overlying algorithms (e.g., routing). Fault tolerance is a necessary feature of a topology to be applicable in realistic scenarios. This paper presents an analysis of the requirements to tolerate crash failures in the topology with the help of Failure detectors. We show that the class of perfect Failure detectors is strong enough to form a reliable underlay for routing and to avoid message loops.