Delay-insensitive identification of neighbors using unslotted and slotted protocols

For many applications, it is desirable for a node to be able to identify the neighbor nodes currently within range. However, the identification procedures for terrestrial communication networks TCNs are inefficient when implemented in long-delay networks LDNs such as underwater acoustic networks or satellite networks, where the propagation time of a packet cannot be neglected. Here, we propose a time-efficient and power-efficient procedure, which is insensitive to propagation delay, for identifying neighbors in an LDN by optimizing the network offered load using either unslotted or slotted protocols. The procedure is adapted to the scenario when node cardinality and distribution are either known or unknown in advance. We achieve improvements as high as 80% in time and 45% in power consumption for our proposed approach compared with approaches developed previously for TCN. Furthermore, we analyze our proposed approach with the inclusion of the capture effect and packet receive time variations. We also provide a closed form formula for finding the optimum guard time and a procedure to estimate the packet receive time variations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.