Welcome: Low Latency and Energy Efficient Neighbor Discovery for Mobile and IoT Devices
Mariem Harmassi, Junaid Ahmed Khan, Yacine M. Ghamri-Doudane, Cyril Faucher · 2018
Energy efficient neighbor discovery for multiple mobile devices in each others proximity is a challenge along duty cycling where low power devices are inactive for a large fraction of time. Existing schemes allow each device to employ a schedule to become active and send periodic messages or listen to neighboring devices to ensure a neighbor discovery in a bounded delay. However, collisions can occur due to simultaneous transmission of messages from multiple devices resulting in failure of neighbor discovery. We propose to reduce the number of message transmissions in a neighbor discovery process to avoid collisions and in result enhance the number of devices discovered.To do so, in this paper, we propose Welcome, a low latency and energy efficient neighbor discovery scheme. Instead of all nodes transmitting messages, only a single node can become a delegate to discover the nodes in vicinity and provide the neighborhood information to its neighbors. A node first finds its eligibility to become delegate based on its residual energy and association to the neighborhood. It then declares itself a delegate and listens to messages from its neighbors. Finally, it broadcasts the information regarding its neighbors to the devices in its communication range. Moreover, delegates can be rotated among neighbors where a node with high eligibility can content to become delegate. Welcome is compared with seven existing neighbor discovery schemes and it successfully discovers 100% of neighbors with low energy consumption and low latency for a neighborhood size of upto 100 nodes.