Effects of Neighbor Attachment Policies on Interference in Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks

Neighbor attachment is the process of establishing links between nodes that on the physical layer are visible to each other. Many strategies can be followed to connect to adjacent nodes. A simple scenario would be to consider all nodes within the transmission range of a node as its neighbors. In future generation communication networks more sophisticated scenarios may be followed to establish neighborhood relations with only a limited number of carefully selected nodes. Different neighbor attachment policies result into different network topologies. In any topology a packet sent from a node to one of its neighbors will experience interference, which is caused by simultaneous communications between other nodes in the network. Obviously, high levels of interference would severely disrupt communications. In this paper we examine effects of neighbor attachment policies on interference. To the best of our knowledge, this important point has not received proper attention before. Our study enables us to identify neighbor attachment directives that can reduce the amount of interference in ad-hoc and sensor network.