AQND: An asymmetric quorum-based neighbor discovery protocol for reducing delay in sensor based systems

Abstract

Neighbor discovery is basic for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) communication, which is the key to network performance. Since sensor nodes were powered by battery, sleep/active rotation was widely adopted to save energy, which led to the neighbor discovery problem. Many timely neighbor discovery protocols are proposed for wake-up scheduling to expedite the discovery and data routing while saving energy. In this paper, an asymmetric quorum-based neighbor discovery (AQND) protocol is proposed to reduce the delay of neighbor discovery and data routing while improving the energy utilization and maintaining a high lifetime. According to our theoretical analysis, the proposed AQND protocol outperforms previous strategies in main performance indicators such as reducing the average relative error of duty cycle, the maximum neighbor discovery delay and the end-to-end discovery delay while improving the energy utilization ratio. In addition, using the proposed AQND protocol to improve the above network performances doesn’t reduce lifetime. Maintaining the end-to-end delay consistent with the previous strategies, the lifetime of network can be improved.