Neighbor Discovery in Short-Range Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

WING The ad hoc networks are rapidly deployed and maintained by the self-organizing actions of the participating devices. The overall performance of many envisioned applications in pervasive computing will heavily rely on the promptness of the self-configuring network procedures. In addition, the devices in ad hoc networks are battery-powered, which makes the energy a scarce resource; therefore, all self-configuring actions should be performed under a condition of minimized power consumption. By definition, ad hoc networks are started by the constituent devices as anonymous networks, such that when a node is activated, it is not aware of the other active participants. Prior to any "useful" communication, the device should learn the identities (IDs) of the devices within its radio range i.e. its neighbors. Unique ID can be, for example, MAC address, assigned to the device in the manufacturing. The procedure, by which each node announces its presence to each neighbor and also detects the presence of all neighbors, is referred to as neighbor discovery. Within this activity, which is a part of the Ph. D. project of Petar Popovski, there have been investigation and proposals of several different distributed algorithms for neighbor discovery, which work under different assumptions. (Petar Popovski, Liljana Gavrilovska, and Ramjee Prasad)