A new methodology for evaluating the neighbor discovery time in schedule-based asynchronous duty-cycling wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Duty cycling is a fundamental mechanism for battery-operated wireless networks, such as wireless sensor networks. Due to its importance, it is an integral part of several Medium Access Protocols and related wireless technologies. In Schedule-based Asynchronous Duty Cycle, nodes activate and deactivate their radio interfaces according to a pre-designed schedule of slots, which guarantees overlapping uptime between two neighbors, independent of the offset between their internal clocks, making communication between them possible. This paper presents a new methodology for evaluating the Neighbor Discovery Time (NDT) of Schedule-based Asynchronous Duty Cycle. Differently from previous methodologies, it accounts for the possibility of the slots in the schedules of the two neighbors not being perfectly border-aligned — an unrealistic assumption in practice. By means of simulation, we show that not taking this under consideration can lead to an overestimate of the NDT by a factor of 2 depending on the particular scenario, thus justifying the importance of our work.•We propose a new subslot-based methodology for computing the NDT of a wakeup schedule used for asynchronous duty cycling.•It replaces the traditional slot-based methodology, by dividing slots into subslots, allowing for the analysis of non-integer clock offsets between nodes, and further allowing mathematical models to consider the more realistic continuous-time case.•Our validation data shows that the slot-based methodology may overestimate NDT by a factor of up to 2, making the proposed subslot-based methodology much more precise.