Lightning: A High-Efficient Neighbor Discovery Protocol for Low Duty Cycle WSNs

摘要

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), due to the limited energy of nodes, discovering neighbors needs to be achieved in an energy-efficient way. This means that, at a given energy consumption, we need to reduce the worst-case neighbor discovery latency as far as possible. In this letter, we propose a novel deterministic neighbor discovery method, called Lightning. Lightning employs two kinds of active slots of different active lengths (we call A slot and C slot, respectively). The active time of C slot is much shorter than that of A slot in order to reduce the energy consumption. In addition, to maximize the energy efficiency, Lightning adopts one-way neighbor discovery method. This makes C slot have the smallest active length that is only enough to send one beaconing packet. Through proactively sending one beaconing packet after one-way discovery, Lightning also realizes bi-directional neighbor discovery. The theoretical analysis indicates that, with the same energy consumption, our method reduces the worst-case latency bound up to 37.9% compared with Searchlight-Trim, the best existing discovery algorithm. The simulation verifies the soundness and effectiveness of our design.