Neighbor discovery in ad-hoc networks

Neighbor Discovery (ND) is the process that initializes a reliable communication between one-hop neighbors in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). This process consists of scheduled exchanges of control messages, called “Hello Messages” (HMs) between one-hop neighbors. HMs build bidirectional links that are used to announce the topology information. Each node uses ND and the topology information to populate its routing tables and to communicate with every other node in the network. In MANETs, ND process is a permanent process to discover one-hop neighbors. It is based on two parameters: 1) ND message interval (the period of time in between sending hello messages); and 2) ND message hold time (the validity time). A reliable ND process sustains a reliable data communication. Therefore, this research studies the impact of the ND parameters in data transmission by measuring the overall packet loss