The 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06) RECOGNIZING MOVING GROUPS WITH INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPORT

Detection of nearby nodes in wireless ad hoc networks requires periodic neighborhood scanning which is rather costly in terms of energy: The nodes transmit the discovery packets and, furthermore, their reception circuits have to be active most of the time. Since distributed moving group detection algorithms rely on detecting nearby nodes, this kind of overhead is unavoidable. However, in most of the scenarios some fixed infrastructure co-exist which may support the detection process. In this paper we propose a method that uses the infrastructure to gain hints about moving groups and switches on the distributed process only if there is some degree of confidence that such a group exists. This reduces the overhead of the neighborhood scans by approximately 90% translating to longer lifetime of the battery-driven nodes.