This paper describes Census, a protocol for node visitation in MANETs. Given a set of tokens, the goal of Census is to ensure that every node is visited by at least one token. Census is a gossip style protocol where the random walks of the tokens are assisted by short, local gradients that guide the tokens towards hitherto unvisited nodes. This achieves fast convergence while eschewing routing structures such as spanning trees that incur a high messaging overhead to maintain under mobility. Analytical bounds on convergence time and message overhead are characterized for single token and multiple token scenarios. The scalability and robustness of Census are demonstrated using simulations in networks ranging from 150 to 4000 nodes.
['Vinod Kulathumani', 'Kenneth W. Parker', 'Mukundan Sridharan', 'Anish Arora']
Census: A protocol for visiting all nodes in MANETs using biased random walks