Context based node discovery mechanism for energy efficiency in wireless networks

Energy is becoming a vital resource in wireless networks and with the introduction of high data rate wireless technologies the future Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) will be able to support demanding applications e.g. interactive games, video sharing etc. and as a result the energy saving mechanisms will become more demanding and challenging. The mobile devices with hybrid character, containing ad hoc and infrastructure access, will need mechanisms that keep them connected in an energy efficient way. For the node to be connected to either a cluster or a solitary node knowledge of the neighbor devices are required to choose a suitable node for cooperative communication; this discovery of information is under the scope of this paper. We present a context based beaconing mechanism both for node discovery and cooperative cluster formation. We have exploited the available beacon Information Elements (IEs) of UWB to embed our own information elements of interest e.g. Energy level, status of node, willingness, etc. to facilitate node discovery and cooperation. A Context Extraction Function (CxEF) has been created to insert and extract information in the beacon. We have also presented a detailed representation of bit mapping for energy and cooperation in beacons. The simulation results show that our mechanism saves a considerable amount of energy compared to other techniques which perform blind node discovery without using context information.