On Heterogeneous Duty Cycles for Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Sensor Networks

Neighbor discovery plays a crucial role in the formation of wireless sensor networks and mobile networks where the power of sensors (or mobile devices) is constrained. Due to the difficulty of clock synchronization, many asynchronous protocols based on wake-up scheduling have been developed over the years in order to enable timely neighbor discovery between neighboring sensors while saving energy. However, existing protocols are not fine-grained enough to support all heterogeneous battery duty cycles, which can lead to a more rapid deterioration of long-term battery health for those without support. Existing research can be broadly divided into two categories according to their neighbor-discovery techniques—the quorum-based protocols and the co-primality based protocols. In this paper, we propose two neighbor discovery protocols, called Hedis and Todis, that control the duty cycle granularity of quorum and co-primality based protocols respectively, by enabling the finest-grained control of heterogeneous duty cycles. We compare the two optimal protocols via analytical and simulation results, which show that the optimal co-primality based protocol (Todis) is not only simpler in its design, but also has a better performance.