Neighbor Discovery and Selection based on the Management of Priorities in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Neighbor discovery can be seen as a crucial point after the wireless ad hoc networks have been deployed. In some practical situations we would like to elect a favourite neighbor to be used for example as a gateway therefore neighbor selection is also required. In this paper, we present NDSP (Neighbor Discovery and Selection Protocol), a randomized approach which handles collision detection to fulfill the neigh-bor discovery in static environments, and deals with priorities to elect these favourite nodes. We relied on Castalia 3.2 in order to compare the approach with two protocols selected from the literature, modified to include neighbor selection: the NS-PRR (Neighbor Selection PRR), and the NS-Hello protocol (Neighbor Selection Hello). We conclude that the NDSP outperforms both reference protocols in terms the time and the energy consumption, and the number of packets sent in both one-hop and multi-hop environments. Furthermore, the proposal achieves to work following more realistic assumptions.