Evaluation and design of beaconing in mobile wireless networks

One of the intrinsic problems of mobility in wireless networks is the discovery of mobile nodes. A widely used solution for this problem is to use different variations of beacons, such as hello packets. Although a poorly designed beaconing scheme may lead to unnecessary energy usage or poor throughput, a systematic approach to analyze and select beaconing parameters is not provided in the literature. Here, we propose a model to study the beaconing efficiency using some measures such as the link lifetime, the probability of link establishment, and the delay to discover a new neighbor. The model is general and does not adhere to any particular mobility model; the only input from the mobility is the distribution of physical link durations, which not only abstracts away the mobility details but also all effects that contribute to the link stability such as non-perfectly omni-directional antennas and the path loss exponents. Among our results, we prove that the periodic beaconing (which is widely used owing to its simplicity) is the best in terms of beacon hits; we compare one-way and two-way beaconing schemes and study beaconing energy optimization. Finally, the model is applied to three cases of ad hoc, delay-tolerant, and sensor networks, and a simple rule of thumb is proposed to efficiently adjust the beacon interval.