A Practical Neighbor Discovery Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Neighbor discovery is a crucial operation frequently executed throughout the life cycle of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Various protocols have been proposed to minimize the discovery latency or to prolong the lifetime of sensors. However, none of them have addressed that all the critical concerns stemming from real WSNs, including communication collisions, latency constraints and energy consumption limitations. In this paper, we propose Spear, the first practical neighbor discovery framework to meet all these requirements. Spear offers two new methods to reduce communication collisions, thus boosting the discovery rate of existing neighbor discovery protocols. Spear also takes into consideration latency constraints and facilitates timely adjustments in order to reduce the discovery latency. Spear offers two practical energy management methods that evidently prolong the lifetime of sensor nodes. Most importantly, Spear automatically improves the discovery results of existing discovery protocols, on which no modification is required. Beyond reporting details of different Spear modules, we also present experiment evaluations on several notable neighbor discovery protocols. Results show that Spear greatly improves the discovery rate from 33.0% to 99.2%, and prolongs the sensor nodes lifetime up to 6.47 times.