Research On Neighbor Discovery Protocol For Ultraviolet Wireless Networks

Non-line-of-sight ultraviolet (UV) communication is an attractive new paradigm of atmospheric optical communication and has been considered for constructing wireless communication networks with various advantageous features against radio frequency (RF) technologies. Knowledge of one-hop neighbors is required by medium access control protocols, routing algorithms, and topology control algorithms. Thus, neighbor discovery is an important initial step in wireless networks. Although there are many existing neighbor discovery protocols designed for RF wireless networks, they cannot be directly applied in the UV context because of UV networks’unique characteristics. So it is very important to design an efficient neighbor discovery protocol which can be applied in UV networks.In this paper, our research focuses on the neighbor discovery protocol for UV networks. The main achievements are the following:1. We study characteristics of UV communication and neighbor discovery protocols in traditional RF wireless ad hoc networks. Then we summarize some issues that required attention in designing a neighbor discovery protocol for UV wireless networks.2. We study existing protocols in UV networks and analyze their advantages and disadvantages. On this basis, we propose a new credit-collection based neighbor discovery protocol with an efficient feedback mechanism for ultraviolet wireless networks. This method can provide good performance in terms of fast discovery speed.3. To evaluate the performance of our protocol, we establish a simulation platform developed with OPNET for UV wireless networks. By extensive simulations, we demonstrated that our protocol is feasible and efficient. Impacts of various parameters in the protocol are also studied and examined by simulations.