Fast Neighbor Discovery for Wireless Ad Hoc Network with Successive Interference Cancellation

Neighbor discovery (ND) is a key step in wireless ad hoc network, which directly affects the efficiency of wireless networking. Improving the speed of ND has always been the goal of ND algorithms. The classical ND algorithms lose packets due to the collision of multiple packets, which greatly affects the speed of the ND algorithms. Traditional methods detect packet collision and implement retransmission when encountering packet loss. However, they does not solve the packet collision problem and the performance improvement of ND algorithms is limited. In this paper, the successive interference cancellation (SIC) technology is introduced into the ND algorithms to unpack multiple collision packets by distinguishing multiple packets in the power domain. Besides, the multi-packet reception (MPR) is further applied to reduce the probability of packet collision by distinguishing multiple received packets, thus further improving the speed of ND algorithms. Six ND algorithms, namely completely random algorithm (CRA), CRA based on SIC (CRA-SIC), CRA based on SIC and MPR (CRA-SIC-MPR), scan-based algorithm (SBA), SBA based on SIC (SBA-SIC), and SBA based on SIC and MPR (SBA-SIC-MPR), are theoretically analyzed and verified by simulation. The simulation results show that SIC and MPR reduce the ND time of SBA by 69.02% and CRA by 66.03% averagely.