Adapting dynamically neighbourhood table entry lifetime in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Neighbour discovery and maintenance of neighbourhood tables have importance in wireless sensor networks. Almost every upper layer application such as routing or self-organizing relies on neighbourhood tables. Imprecise tables may lead to failures that may be costly in terms of resources which are very limited in such networks. Neighbourhood tables are achieved thanks to the Hello protocol. Several studies propose smart schemes to dynamically adapt the frequency of Hello messages but none of them investigates the way the refreshment period of entries in table should be adapted. In this paper, we introduce the Neighbourhood Lifetime Algorithm (NLA), the very first algorithm that adapts dynamically the refreshment period of entries in neighbourhood tables, based on the speed of node and the frequency of the Hello message. Our simulation results show and demonstrate the efficiency of NLA and its high performance to keep neighbourhood tables consistent.