Collision-Aware Neighbor Discovery Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensor nodes need to discover their neighbor nodes to construct network topology before they communicate with each other. Though there are many previous works for a neighbor discovery protocol, they do not consider a collision problem that may occur during the neighbor discovery. In this paper, we propose a microslot model to describe transmit/receive operation when a sensor node is in active. On the basis of this microslot model, we propose a collision-aware neighbor discovery protocol which avoids collisions during the neighbor discovery process. We provide a probabilistic analysis of our protocol. The proposed method is shown to effectively reduce collision probability during neighbor discovery.