Neighbor Discovery Based on Cross-Technology Communication for Mobile Applications

Abstract

Neighbor discovery is essential for mobile devices to find each other before communications. Traditional discovery protocols are constrained by the in-technology communication paradigm. Cross-Technology Communications enable ZigBee nodes to be coordinated by a WiFi node without any hardware changes or gateway equipment, which sheds the light on more efficient neighbor discovery schemes. In this work, we introduce a new direction for neighbor discovery based on Cross-Technology Communication technique and propose a physical-layer technique called NewBee. NewBee takes the advantages of coordinations from a WiFi node to assist ZigBee nodes for neighbor discovery. A simple yet effective Countdown Mechanism is employed so that ZigBee nodes are coordinately waked up according to the beacons in the Countdown Mechanism. We give a rigorous analysis on NewBee and the worst-case discovery latency is significantly reduced from the traditional $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ , where $n$ indicates the reciprocal of node's duty-cycle. The experimental results show that NewBee only needs 11%, 10%, 2.5%, 2.4% and 4.4% percent of discovery time compared with the state-of-the-art BlindDate, SearchLight, Disco, Quorum, and Birthday protocols with 5% nodes’ duty-cycle, respectively.