ABSTRACT
One of the main characteristics of ad hoc and sensor networks is that the communication infrastructure is provided by the nodes themselves. When being deployed, the nodes of such networks initially form a chaotic unstructured radio network, which means that no reliable and efficient communication pattern has been established yet. Before any reasonable communication can be carried out, nodes must structure the network; that is, they must set up a medium access scheme. The problem of initializing and structuring radio networks is of great importance in practice. Even in an ad hoc network with a small number of devices such as Bluetooth, initialization tends to be slow. In a multihop scenario with a large number of nodes, the time consumption for establishing a reasonable communication pattern increases even further. This chapter focuses on the vital transition from an unstructured to a structured network, the initialization phase.
