Erasure Correction for Noisy Radio Networks

Abstract: The radio network model is a well-studied model of wireless, multi-hop networks. However, radio networks make the strong assumption that messages are delivered deterministically. The recently introduced noisy radio network model relaxes this assumption by dropping messages independently at random. In this work we quantify the relative computational power of noisy radio networks and classic radio networks. In particular, given a non-adaptive protocol for a fixed radio network we show how to reliably simulate this protocol if noise is introduced with a multiplicative cost of $\mathrm{poly}(\log \Delta, \log \log n)$ rounds where $n$ is the number nodes in the network and $\Delta$ is the max degree. Moreover, we demonstrate that, even if the simulated protocol is not non-adaptive, it can be simulated with a multiplicative $O(\Delta \log ^2 \Delta)$ cost in the number of rounds. Lastly, we argue that simulations with a multiplicative overhead of $o(\log \Delta)$ are unlikely to exist by proving that an $\Omega(\log \Delta)$ multiplicative round overhead is necessary under certain natural assumptions.