A Spontaneous Wireless Ad Hoc Trusted Neighbor Network Creation Protocol

Abstract

Spontaneous networks lack an a priori communication infrastructure, the neighbors are unknown right after the deployment, and they are used during a period of time and in a certain location. In this paper, we present a new randomized creation model of a spontaneous wireless ad hoc network based on trusted neighbors. The idea is to manage the neighbor discovery with the exchange of identity cards, and the checking of a signature establishes a relationship based on trust of the neighbors. To asses the performance of our randomized trusted network proposal and compare it against an existing deterministic protocol used as reference, we relied on Castalia 3.2 simulator, regarding 4 metrics: time, energy consumption, throughput, and number of discoveries vs packet sent ratio. We found that our proposal outperforms the reference protocol in terms of time, energy, and discoveries vs packet sent ratio in a one-hop setting, while it outperforms the reference protocol regarding all 4 metrics in multihop environments. We also evaluated our proposal through simulations varying the transmission probability and proved that it does not require to know the number of nodes if a fixed transmission probability is set, providing reasonable results. Moreover, our proposal is based on collision detection, it knows when to terminate the process, it does not require a transmission schedule, and it follows more realistic assumptions. In addition, a qualitative comparison is carried out, comparing our proposal against existing protocols from the literature.