Efficient group-based discovery for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Due to the combination of constrained power, low duty cycle, and high mobility, neighbor discovery is one of the most challenging problems in wireless sensor networks. Existing discovery designs can be divided into two types: pairwisebased and group-based. The former schemes suffer from high discovery delay, while the latter ones accelerate the discovery process but incur too much energy overhead, far from practical. In this article, we propose a novel efficient group-based discovery method based on relative distance, which makes a delicate trade-off between discovery delay and energy consumption. Instead of directly referring to the wake-up schedules of a whole group of nodes, efficient groupbased discovery selectively recommends nodes that are most likely to be neighbors, in which the probability is calculated based on the nodes' relative distance. Moreover, the sequence of received signal strengths are employed to estimate the relative distance for avoiding the effect of the node distribution. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the design. The results indicate that efficient group-based discovery statistically achieves a good trade-off between energy cost and discovery latency. Efficient group-based discovery also shows one order of magnitude reduction in discovery delay with a maximum of 6.5% increase in energy consumption compared with typical discovery methods.

A Practical Neighbor Discovery Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The first tool is called quorum system : for any two intersected quorums, two neighboring nodes could choose any quorum in the system to design the discovery schedule and the discovery latency can be bounded in a short time. Many algorithms are related to the quorum system [15,17,18,19,30], but only a few of them support asymmetric duty cycles of the nodes, such as Hedis [15]. Another important tool is co-primality where two co-prime numbers are chosen by the neighbors to design the discovery schedule, and they can discover each other within a bounded latency by the Chinese Remainder Theorem [32].…”

“…Compared to probability-based protocols, deterministic protocols are much more popular in practice. This approach is also the main focus of this paper because with a deterministic discovery schedule the discovery latency is mostly stable [12,13,15,16,18,21,22,26,30,31]. However, existing deterministic protocols mainly target at only two neighbors, where collision often does not occur.…”