McDisc: A Reliable Neighbor Discovery Protocol in Low Duty Cycle and Multi-channel Wireless Networks

Neighbor discovery is the very first step for many mobile applications. Previous neighbor discovery protocols that use single channel may be failed when faced with unreliable channel environment, whereas most of multi-channel schemes do not focus on neighbor discovery in low duty cycle wireless networks. The key challenge for multi-channel slotted neighbor discovery is how to effectively assign the channel during each active slot. We propose McDisc, an energy-efficient and reliable duty-cycle-based neighbor discovery protocol that is built on two basic idea. First, it leverages randomized approach to establish the multi-channel discovery schedule, where the node is assigned to the chosen channel during each active slot randomly. Randomized approach may suffer from extremely low discovery probability in worst case. In tackling this problem, we then employ deterministic channel assignment that can ensure bounded discovery latency. The theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm that McDisc can cope with unreliable channel environment ensuring reliable and low latency discovery efficiently. In terms of 60% packet loss ratio, McDisc outperforms U-Connect [1] by approximate 100% in the worst-case discovery latency.