Oblivious neighbor discovery for wireless devices with directional antennas

Neighbor discovery, the process of discovering all neighbors in a device's communication range, is one of the bootstrapping networking primitives of paramount importance and is particularly challenging when devices have directional antennas instead of omni-directional ones. In this paper, we study the following fundamental problem which we term as oblivious neighbor discovery: How can neighbor nodes with heterogeneous antenna configurations and without clock synchronization discover each other within a bounded delay in a fully decentralised manner without any prior coordination? We first establish a theoretical framework on oblivious neighbor discovery and establish the performance bound of any neighbor discovery protocol achieving oblivious discovery. Guided by the theoretical results, we then design an oblivious neighbor discovery protocol and prove that it achieves guaranteed oblivious discovery with order-minimal worst-case discovery delay in the asynchronous and heterogeneous environment. We further demonstrate how our protocol can be configured to achieve a desired trade-off between average and worst-case performance.