Investigations on passive discovery schemes for IEEE 802.15.4 based Body Sensor Networks

In this paper, we investigate passive discovery of IEEE 802.15.4-based Body Sensor Networks (BSNs). BSNs are wearable networks that monitor the vital functions of the body while the person can roam around freely. One challenging task that BSNs has to perform is the discovery of certain coordinator nodes, for example gateways towards data processing and storage services. We are presenting a cooperative passive discovery scheme (the rumour-based scheme) for the beacon-enabled mode that is based on a simple class of listening strategies called sweep strategy. We consider a simple scenario of unbounded targeted discovery where a specific mobile BSN is searching for a specific destination network. We evaluate the performance of our scheme in terms of the average discovery time using simulations. The results show that our strategy can significantly reduce the time required to discover the target network.