Understanding slotless neighbor discovery: demo abstract

The process of two wireless devices meeting over-the-air for the first time is referred to as neighbor discovery. In mobile ad-hoc networks, battery powered devices duty-cycle their radios during neighbor discovery. As a result, they transmit and receive for very short durations of time and sleep at other times. Energy-efficient protocols, which guarantee short, bounded latencies while achieving low energy-consumptions are highly important for long battery lifetimes. In the past, neighbor discovery has been carried out mostly using slotted protocols, which subdivide time into multiple, equal length periods, called slots. An alternative are slotless protocols, which decouple beaconing from listening and can potentially achieve lower latency-duty-cycle-relations. As in slotted protocols, they also guarantee bounded latencies. However, understanding the mechanisms that ensure these deterministic bounds is more complex than for slotted protocols, since they rely on less intuitive concepts. In this demo, we propose a setup that visualizes the operation of two radios with slotless protocols in real-time, thereby providing insights that help in understanding slotless neighbor discovery. This demo is supposed to accompany the paper entitled "Griassdi: Mutually Assisted Slotless Neighbor Discovery Protocols", which appeared at IPSN 2017 as a regular paper.