Never Live Without Neighbors: From Single- to Multi-Channel Neighbor Discovery for Mobile Sensing Applications

Neighbor discovery is of paramount importance in mobile sensing applications and is particularly challenging if the operating frequencies of mobile devices span multiple channels. In this paper, we formulate the multi-channel neighbor discovery problem and establish a theoretical framework of it, under which we derive the performance bound of any neighbor discovery protocol guaranteeing discovery. We then develop a multi-channel discovery protocol that achieves guaranteed discovery with order-minimum worst-case discovery delay and fine-grained control of energy conservation levels.