A Practical Neighbor Discovery Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Neighbor discovery is a crucial operation frequently executed throughout the life cycle of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Various protocols have been proposed to minimize the discovery latency or to prolong the lifetime of sensors. However, none of them have addressed that all the critical concerns stemming from real WSNs, including communication collisions, latency constraints and energy consumption limitations. In this paper, we propose Spear, the first practical neighbor discovery framework to meet all these requirements. Spear offers two new methods to reduce communication collisions, thus boosting the discovery rate of existing neighbor discovery protocols. Spear also takes into consideration latency constraints and facilitate