Evaluating passive neighborhood discovery for Low Power Listening MAC protocols

Low Power Listening (LPL) MAC protocols are widely used in today's sensors networks for duty cycling. Their simplicity and power efficiency ensures a long network life when nodes are battery driven and their easy deployment and lower cost of maintenance makes them suitable to be used in hard-to-access places and harsh conditions. We argue that to fully utilize energy efficiency provided by LPL, other protocols in the protocol stack should be aware of mechanisms. In this paper, we focus on neighborhood discovery protocols and discuss their energy efficient integration with LPL. Then, we study the possibility of using a completely passive approach for neighborhood discovery in such networks and provide an analytical model for its performance characteristics. We verify our performance model both by simulation and implementation in TinyOS. Our evaluation results confirm the efficiency of our proposed method in duty-cycled sensor networks.