Collision-Aware Deterministic Neighbor Discovery in Static Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Abstract

In ad hoc wireless networks, the devices are equipped with limited range radio transceivers for communications. This type of networks does not have a communications infrastructure right after the deployment, and nodes do not know which other nodes are within their transmission range (neighbors). So, each node must discover its neighbors as a first step. In this paper we present two approaches to the neighbor discovery problem in static one-hop scenarios: TDMA-based (Time Division Multiple Access based) and Leader-based protocols. To assess the performance of these approaches we performed simulation experiments using the Castalia 3.2 simulator, comparing the proposed protocols against two protocols widely used in the literature as reference - the PRR (Probabilistic Round Robin) protocol and the Hello protocol - measuring two metrics: neighbor discovery time and number of discovered neighbors, for all the protocols tested. Results show that the leader-based and TDMA-based protocols outperform state-of-the-art solutions in the presence of collisions regarding both metrics, while finding that the TDMA-based protocol $(O(N^{2}))$ is slower than the leader-based approach $(O(N))$. The TDMA-based proposal decreases time consumption at least at a factor of 6 in comparison with Hello protocol and a factor of 3 compared to PRR protocol. Furthermore, the leader-based protocol reduces the time consumption at least at a factor of $6N$ in comparison with Hello and a factor of $3N$ compared to PRR protocol.