Collaborative neighbor discovery in directional wireless sensor networks: algorithm and analysis

Fernaz Narin Nur,Md Abdur Razzaque,Selina Sharmin,Md Ahsan Habib,Ahmad Almogren,Mohammad Mehedi Hassan,Md Shariful Islam,Atif Alamri

doi:10.1186/s13638-017-0903-6

Abstract

In directional wireless sensor networks (DSNs), sensor nodes with directional antennas provide extended network lifetime and better coverage performance. However, one of the key challenges of directional nodes is to discover their neighbors due to difficulty in achieving synchronization among their directed transmissions and receptions. Existing solutions suffer from high discovery latency and poor percentage of neighbor discovery either due to lack of proper coordination or centralized management of the discovery operation. In this work, we develop a collaborative neighbor discovery (COND) mechanism for DSNs. Each COND node polls to directly discover its neighbors in a distributed way and collaborates with the already discovered nodes so as to allow indirect discovery. It helps to increase the neighbor discovery performance significantly. A Markov chain-based analytical model is developed to quantify theoretical performances of the proposed COND system. The performance of the COND system is evaluated in Network Simulator Version 3, and simulation results reveal that it greatly reduces the discovery latency and increases neighbor discovery ratio compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Highlights

In directional wireless sensor networks (DSNs), sensor devices with directional antennas sense data and deliver them in a multihop fashion toward the sink node
Our work is different from the above studies in that we develop a fully distributed neighbor discovery mechanism, where both the transmissions and receptions are directional and nodes collaborate with their neighbors to find other neighbors, reducing neighbor discovery latency significantly
7 Conclusions In this paper, we investigated distributed solutions to the problem of neighbor discovery in DSNs and introduced indirect neighbor discovery through collaboration among the already discovered nodes

Summary

Introduction

In directional wireless sensor networks (DSNs), sensor devices with directional antennas sense data and deliver them in a multihop fashion toward the sink node. A fully directional scan-based asynchronous neighbor discovery algorithm is proposed in [11], where each node senses the medium and transmits HELLO message in a random direction and gathers location of the neighbor nodes, reducing the number of collisions among reply packets. A fully directional and centralized three-way sectored antenna neighbor discovery (SAND) algorithm is proposed in [13], where a token is passed among network nodes sequentially to discover their surrounding neighbors. Our work is different from the above studies in that we develop a fully distributed neighbor discovery mechanism, where both the transmissions and receptions are directional and nodes collaborate with their (already discovered) neighbors to find other neighbors, reducing neighbor discovery latency significantly This indirect neighbor discovery and selective feedback policies jointly help our algorithm to decrease the collisions in the network.

Discrete time Markov chain model

Findings

Conclusions