Energy Efficient Terminal-Discovering in Mobile Delay Tolerant Ad-hoc Networks

Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) mechanism is widely utilized in sparse mobile networks, in which data is forwarded by using the "store-carry-forward" manner. Since there is no communication infrastructure in such scenario, terminals must probe their environment to discover other terminals, which can be an extremely energy-consuming process. To discover other terminals, both detection range and detection frequency impact the Missing Probability, which denotes the probability terminals within probing range is missed to be discovered. On the other hand, above two parameters impact the terminal energy consumption as well. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between the Missing Probability and the energy consumption which are both impacted by detection range and detection frequency. Furthermore, a utility function in terms of both energy consumption and Missing Probability with considering detection efficiency is proposed, and the simulation result shows that terminal-discovering performance could be improved by properly selecting detection frequency and detection range.