Asymmetric Block Design-Based Neighbor Discovery Protocol in Sensor Networks

Neighbor discovery is one of the emerging research areas in a wireless sensor network. After sensors are distributed, neighbor discovery is the first process to set up a communication channel with neighboring sensors. This paper proposes a new block design–based asymmetric neighbor discovery protocol for sensor networks. We borrow the concept of combinatorial block designs for our block combination scheme for neighbor discovery. First, we introduce an asymmetric neighbor discovery problem and define a target research question. Second, we propose a new asymmetric block design–based neighbor discovery protocol and explain how it works. Third, we analyze the worst-case neighbor discovery latency numerically between our protocol and some well-known protocols in the literature, and compare and evaluate the performance between the proposed protocol and others. Our protocol reveals that the worst-case latency is much lower than that of Disco and U-Connect. Finally, we conclude that the minimum number of slots per a neighbor schedule shows the lowest discovery time in terms of discovery latency and energy consumption.