Neighbor discovery in wireless ad hoc networks based on group testing

Fast and efficient discovery of all neighboring nodes by a node new to a neighborhood is critical to the deployment of wireless ad hoc networks. Different than the conventional ALOHA-type random access discovery schemes, this paper assumes that all nodes in the neighborhood simultaneously send their unique on-off signatures known to the receive node. In particular, a transmitter does not transmit any energy during an “off” mini-slot in its signature sequence. The received signal can be viewed as the outcome of a sequence of tests over the mini-slots, where the outcome of a test is positive if there is energy at the corresponding mini-slot from at least one neighbor, and negative if none of the neighboring nodes transmits energy during the mini-slot. The neighbor discovery problem is thus equivalent to a classical group testing problem. Two practical and scalable detection algorithms are developed from the group testing viewpoint. Unlike some previous neighbor discovery schemes using coherent multiuser detection, which are difficult to implement due to lack of training, the proposed scheme requires only non-coherent energy detection. The proposed algorithms are shown to achieve faster and more reliable discovery than existing random access schemes.