Using Crowd sourcing for Local Topology Discovery in Wireless Networks

In modern wireless networks, the problem of topology discovery is hard to solve, because of the lack of a central intelligence with full knowledge of the location and parameters of the wireless devices. We introduce the idea of estimating the local topology by means of user reports. We provide a crisp mathematical formulation of the problem in the case of a simple mobility model, dimensioning the number of users for the discovery to be effective. Finally, we show that, under certain conditions, our mobility model can effectively be used to provide an upper bound on the number of reports needed to discover the local topology, for a wide range of mobility models.