Neighbor Discovery Based on Cross-Technology Communication for Mobile Applications
Demin Gao, Zhijun Li, Yunhuai Liu, Tian He
Abstract
Neighbor discovery is essential for mobile devices to find each other before communications. Traditional discovery protocols are constrained by the in-technology communication paradigm. Cross-Technology Communications enable ZigBee nodes to be coordinated by a WiFi node without any hardware changes or gateway equipment, which sheds the light on more efficient neighbor discovery schemes. In this work, we introduce a new direction for neighbor discovery based on Cross-Technology Communication technique and propose a physical-layer technique called NewBee. NewBee takes the advantages of coordinations from a WiFi node to assist ZigBee nodes for neighbor discovery. A simple yet effective Countdown Mechanism is employed so that ZigBee nodes are coordinately waked up according to the beacons in the Countdown Mechanism. We give a rigorous analysis on NewBee and the worst-case discovery latency is significantly reduced from the traditional O(n <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) to O(n), where n indicates the reciprocal of node's duty-cycle. The experimental results show that NewBee only needs 11%, 10%, 2.5%, 2.4% and 4.4% percent of discovery time compared with the state-of-the-art BlindDate, SearchLight, Disco, Quorum, and Birthday protocols with 5% nodes' duty-cycle, respectively.