Energy-aware Randomized Neighbor Discovery Protocol based on Collision Detection in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In wireless ad hoc networks, neighbor discovery is necessary as an initial step. In this work we present LECDH (Low Energy Collision Detection Hello), an energy-aware randomized handshake-based neighbor discovery protocol for static environments. We carried out simulations through Castalia 3.2 simulator and compared LECDH with an existing protocol EAH (Energy Aware Hello) used as reference. We conclude that the proposal outperforms the reference protocol both in one-hop and multi-hop environments in terms of Energy consumption, Discovery time, Number of discovered neighbors, Throughput, and Discoveries per packet sent, for high duty cycles. Moreover, for low number of nodes in LECDH, as the duty cycle is reduced the performance is better according to all 5 metrics in both environments. Overall, we found that our proposal follows more realistic assumptions and still allows nodes to succeed at discovering all their neighbors almost with probability 1. Moreover, a qualitative comparison of the reference solution and our proposal is included in this paper.