Cooperation in neighbor discovery

Neighbor discovery is a fundamental task in wireless networks in order to find potential communication partners, discover services, and to efficiently access the wireless resource. In this paper we focus on the passive neighbor discovery in multi-channel environments. We present different discovery approaches with low computational complexity that utilize cooperation between devices by exchanging discovery results in order to improve the discovery process. Furthermore, we present an optimized discovery approach that uses multiple transceivers and evaluate the bounds on the performance under idealized conditions. We analyze the impact of different network parameters such as number of channels and number of neighbors on the discovery times of the developed approaches by using a simulative evaluation. By putting the discovery times achievable with the cooperative or “gossiping” approaches into perspective with the multi-transceiver results, we can quantify the value of cooperation in terms of numbers of transceivers.