Neighbor discovery in mobile sensing applications: A comprehensive survey

The ubiquitous deployment of personal mobile devices today has boosted numerous mobile sensing applications where sensing data should be timely collected and exchanged among participating sensors. An important bootstrapping primitive in such applications is neighbor discovery. Designing distributed neighbor discovery protocols in mobile sensing applications is particularly challenging because of the duty cycling operation mode where mobile devices, usually battery-powered, switch between active and dormant modes periodically to conserve energy. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey on the latest advance and development in this field by covering probabilistic, deterministic and collaborative neighbor discovery approaches developed in the literature. The focus of our survey on the developed neighbor discovery protocols is their design ideas and methodologies that may inspire and guide the development of new solutions in the future research. We also highlight a number of important and relevant research challenges that have not been addressed in the existing literature and that deserve further attention and investigation. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.