On the impact of neighborhood discovery on geographical routing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensing nodes operate in dynamic environments resulting in neighboring nodes being discovered or lost at any moment causing the network topology to change constantly. Hence, routing schemes especially geographical ones (which use node positions to route data packets) require periodic exchange of control packets to discover neighboring nodes. Even though it is intuitive that the overhead caused by their periodic broadcasts may affect the end-to-end performance of the routing scheme, previous works have not thoroughly studied the impact of transmission power and frequency of control packets in static as well as mobile environments. Hence, based on our study, Distributed Neighborhood Discovery Protocol (DNDP) is proposed that can make online decisions to find the best transmit power and frequency for sending discovery packets so to minimize the effect on routing.