On Achieving Asynchronous Energy-Efficient Neighbor Discovery for Mobile Sensor Networks

Recent advances in mobile sensor networks (MSNs) lead to a wide demand of wireless communication based applications. However, due to the battery technology constraint, many MSNs-based applications are confined by the limited power resource capacity. Thus, discovering neighbors with minimal power consumption and latency becomes an indispensable characteristic to guarantee the feasibility of above applications. Most of previously proposed time-slotted-based neighbor discovery protocols excessively idealize the power consumption model, which ignores the power consumption and time duration of the transient state. In this paper, we propose a more practical model named enhanced power consumption model that considers the power consumption and time duration of the transient state. We then propose the asynchronous energy-efficient neighbor discovery protocols called Quick-Connect (Q-Connect) including Q-ConnectA, Q-ConnectU and Q-ConnectUI protocols, each of which can provide a strict upper bound on the discovery latency. We consider both the slot-aligned and slot-unaligned cases. For slot-aligned case, we propose the Q-ConnectA protocol, which can greatly reduce the worst-case discovery latency. For slot-unaligned case, we first propose the Q-ConnectU protocol, based on which we further propose an improved protocol called Q-ConnectUI. Finally, we conduct state-based simulations to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed Q-Connect protocols.