A Survey on Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Sensor Networks

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Neighbor Discovery in Wireless Sensor Networks"

by

Mr. Wei SUN


Abstract:

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have enabled a great many of novel 
applications such as environmental monitoring, health monitoring, 
surveillance, etc. Due to the slow advance in battery technology, power 
management has been a hot research topic during the past decade. Among all 
extensive studies on minimizing power consumption of sensor nodes, 
neighbor discovery is one of the fundamental components focusing on 
communication and access in ad hoc networks. Because of the energy 
constraint, sensor nodes usually work on a low duty cycle, notably by 
turning off radio for a large proportion of time. However, the basic 
requirement of communication between two nodes is that they need to be 
active (i.e., radio on) at the same time. The crux of neighbor discovery 
is not only to ensure discovery, but discover neighbors as soon as 
possible (low latency) while saving energy as much as possible (low duty 
cycle).

This work surveys the literature of neighbor discovery protocols (NDPs). 
In general, they can be roughly classified into four classes: the Birthday 
protocols, over-half occupation, rotation-resistant intersection, and 
coprime methods. The Birthday protocols act as representatives of NDPs 
using probabilistic approaches in which a node decides to listen, 
transmit, and sleep with probabilities. The original idea of over-half 
occupation is to be active on at least half of each cycle/round, though 
refinement has been proposed to decrease its high duty cycle. Methods of 
rotation-resistant intersection formulate the problem of discovery using 
combinatorial characteristics of time slots. Neighbor discovery is 
guaranteed with a worst-case bound thanks to the Chinese Remainder 
Theorem. We present and compare several representative protocols in these 
four classes, and point out future directions of NDPs.


Date:                   Thursday, 10 January 2013

Time:                   2:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3501
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Yunhao Liu (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Qiong Luo (Supervisor)
                         Dr. Gary Chan (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Kai Chen
 			Dr. Raymond Wong


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