Energy Efficient Neighbor Discovery Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Coprime Numbers

In a long-term monitoring wireless sensor network (WSN) application, sensors are frequently deployed in a wide and an unattended geographical area to gather useful information for a long period of time. Although energy efficiency is affected by various factors, the wireless communication unit is typically the most energy-intensive component of wireless sensors. To extend the life of wireless sensors, they alternate between sleep and active modes to conserve energy. Thus, to exchange a message with neighboring sensors, both sending and receiving sensors must discover each other and stay awake simultaneously. This paper proposes a new neighbor discovery protocol (NDP) by enhancing U-Connect, a well-known protocol that constructs neighbor discovery schedules using only a single prime number. Although the proposed method shares the same characteristics as U-Connect, it offers greater flexibility than U-Connect in terms of duty cycles and schedule lengths. Our numerical analysis based on a power-latency (PL) product shows that the proposed method is more efficient than other NDPs such as Quorum, U-Connect, Disco, and ECNDP.