Asynchronous neighbor discovery with unreliable link in wireless mobile networks

Abstract

In wireless mobile networks, neighbor discovery is fundamental to many useful applications. The limited energy of mobile devices stresses the need for effective and energy-saving asynchronous neighbor discovery protocols. The neighbor discovery would fail due to some uncontrollable factors such as hardware errors or sudden interruptions, which are considered as the unreliable link in this paper. Existing works do not take the unreliable link into consideration and the performances with unreliable link can still be improved. In this paper, we assume a certain probability that unreliable link would happen, and design a novel deterministic Quorum System (QS)—E-grid(k) QS and a novel probabilistic QS—Plain(k) QS and propose two algorithms based on these two QSs to solve the asynchronous neighbor discovery problem in wireless mobile networks with unreliable link. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate our algorithms. We use the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the discovery latency and the Valid Overlapped Time Slots (VOTS) of QS in the evaluation. Simulation results show that Plain(k) and E-grid(k) QSs outperform most existing neighbor discovery protocols in both P2P model and clique model with unreliable or reliable link.