Network-wide OR/AND with ultra-wideband (in less than 1 millisecond)

What is it about?

Low-power wireless networks need to take global binary decisions all the time: Should the network enter sleep to save energy? Do nodes have to share data? Is it time to update communication schedules? Flick is a novel network primitive that can establish binary decisions like these over multiple hops in just a fraction of a millisecond, with order-of-magnitude improvement over the state of the art.

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Why is it important?

With Flick, we make low-power networks truly low-power, getting rid of energy-hungry operations used to establish simple binary values. We show the hidden potential of ultra-wideband (UWB) for communication, exploiting in a novel way multiple characteristics of the radio technology: from its reliable concurrent transmissions to its fast preamble detection.