Extended block neighbor discovery protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor network applications

For heterogeneous wireless sensor network applications, sensor nodes need diverse duty cycles and energy efficient neighbor discovery protocols (NDPs) so that they can rapidly find their neighbor nodes. However, existing block NDPs have very limited duty cycle sets. To solve this problem, we propose extended block NDP (EBNDP), a protocol that can support diverse duty cycles. EBNDP adaptively generates block candidates depending on duty cycle requirements. It selects block sets based on a heuristic search approach and combines the selected block sets to make a new block design. This combined block design supports the duty cycle requirements and has proper performance that is close to optimal block design regarding latency and energy consumption. To evaluate the effectiveness of EBNDP, we implemented various block combinations depending on the duty cycles and compared the performance of each block combination. We also compared EBNDP with other NDPs such as Quorum, Optimal, Random, and OR-based NDPs. Through experimentation, we showed that EBNDP outperformed other NDPs in all duty cycles.