BlindDate: A Neighbor Discovery Protocol

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

Neighbor discovery is of paramount importance in mobile sensing applications that rely heavily on data timely collected and shared among nearby users. Guaranteed discovery with bounded latency and supporting heterogenous duty cycles to provide fine-grained control of energy conservation levels are among the most crucial requirements in the design of efficient neighbor discovery protocols. While simultaneously satisfying these two requirements is non-trivial, the situation is exacerbated if the operating frequencies of mobile devices span multiple channels and discovery occurs only if nodes switch to the same channel. In this paper, we formulate this problem as heterogeneous multi-channel neighbor discovery problem and establish a theoretical framework of the problem, under which we derive the performance bound of any neighbor discovery protocol. Based on the theoretical results, we then develop Mc-Dis (Multi-channel Discovery), a novel multi-channel discovery protocol that (1) achieves guaranteed discovery with order-minimal worst-case discovery delay and (2) supports almost all duty cycles to provide fine-grained control of energy conservation levels.

Mobile devices apply neighbor discovery (ND) protocols to wirelessly initiate a first contact within the shortest possible amount of time and with minimal energy consumption. For this purpose, over the last decade, a vast number of ND protocols have been proposed, which have progressively reduced the relation between the time within which discovery is guaranteed and the energy consumption. In spite of the simplicity of the problem statement, even after more than 10 years of research on this specific topic, new solutions are still proposed even today. Despite the large number of known ND protocols, given an energy budget, what is the best achievable latency still remains unclear. This paper addresses this question and for the first time presents safe and tight, duty-cycle-dependent bounds on the worst-case discovery latency that no ND protocol can beat. Surprisingly, several existing protocols are indeed optimal, which has not been known until now. We conclude that there is no further potential to improve the relation between latency and duty-cycle, but future ND protocols can improve their robustness against beacon collisions.

Network connectivity and link quality information are the fundamental requirements of wireless sensor network protocols to perform their desired functionality. Most of the existing discovery protocols have only focused on the neighbor discovery problem, while a few number of them provide an integrated neighbor search and link estimation. As these protocols require a careful parameter adjustment before network deployment, they cannot provide scalable and accurate network initialization in large-scale dense wireless sensor networks with random topology. Furthermore, performance of these protocols has not entirely been evaluated yet. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive simulation study on the efficiency of employing adaptive protocols compared to the existing nonadaptive protocols for initializing sensor networks with random topology. In this regard, we propose adaptive network initialization protocols which integrate the initial neighbor discovery with link quality estimation process to initialize large-scale dense wireless sensor networks without requiring any parameter adjustment before network deployment. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to provide a detailed simulation study on the performance of integrated neighbor discovery and link quality estimation protocols for initializing sensor networks. This study can help system designers to determine the most appropriate approach for different applications.

Tactical Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide a low-signature communications system that can be used for a wide variety of military applications. However, these networks are vulnerable to intrusion and must balance security with performance and longevity. The neighbor discovery process in a WSN is vital for nodes to maintain network connectivity, but it introduces security vulnerabilities. In addition, existing protocols for securing the neighbor discovery process use public key encryption (PKE), which is computationally expensive for low-powered, resource-constrained IEEE 802.15.4 enabled sensor devices. Therefore, a lightweight algorithm to secure the neighbor discovery process is necessary to prevent unauthorized nodes from accessing network data and resources. We develop a key management algorithm that modifies the commonly used Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) and Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. We replace PKE in NPD and SEND with a symmetric encryption algorithm, AES, to allow for energy efficiency. In addition, we implement the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm for symmetric key management. We simulate our algorithm in MATLAB to demonstrate its effectiveness in securing the neighbor discovery protocol while providing energy and message efficiency and key security.

In a long-term monitoring wireless sensor network (WSN) application, sensors are frequently deployed in a wide and an unattended geographical area to gather useful information for a long period of time. Although energy efficiency is affected by various factors, the wireless communication unit is typically the most energy-intensive component of wireless sensors. To extend the life of wireless sensors, they alternate between sleep and active modes to conserve energy. Thus, to exchange a message with neighboring sensors, both sending and receiving sensors must discover each other and stay awake simultaneously. This paper proposes a new neighbor discovery protocol (NDP) by enhancing U-Connect, a well-known protocol that constructs neighbor discovery schedules using only a single prime number. Although the proposed method shares the same characteristics as U-Connect, it offers greater flexibility than U-Connect in terms of duty cycles and schedule lengths. Our numerical analysis based on a power-latency (PL) product shows that the proposed method is more efficient than other NDPs such as Quorum, U-Connect, Disco, and ECNDP.

As an indispensable part of Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are more and more widely used with the rapid development of IoT. The neighbor discovery protocols are the premise of communication between nodes and networking in energy-limited self-organizing wireless networks, and play an important role in WSNs. Because the node energy is limited, neighbor discovery must operate in an energy-efficient manner, that is, under the condition of a given energy budget, the neighbor discovery performance should be as good as possible, such that the discovery latency would be as small as possible and the discovered neighbor percentage as large as possible. The indirect neighbor discovery mainly uses the information of the neighbors that have been found by a pairwise discovery method to more efficiently make a re-planning of the discovery wake-up schedules of the original pairwise neighbor discovery, thereby improving the discovery energy efficiency. The current indirect neighbor discovery methods are mainly divided into two categories: one involves removing the inefficient active slots in the original discovery wake-up schedules, and the other involves adding some efficient active slots. However, the two categories of methods have their own limitations. The former does not consider that this removal operation destroys the integrity of the original discovery wake-up schedules and hence the possibility of discovering new neighbors is reduced, which adversely affects the discovered neighbor percentage. For the latter category, there are still inefficient active slots that were not removed in the re-planned wake-up schedules. The motivation of this paper is to combine the advantages of these two types of indirect neighbor discovery methods, that is, to combine the addition of efficient active slots and the removal of inefficient active slots. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes, for the first time, the concept of virtual nodes in neighbor discovery to maximize the integrity of the original wake-up schedules and achieve the goals of adding efficient active slots and removing inefficient active slots. Specifically, a virtual node is a collaborative group that is formed by nodes within a small range. The nodes in a collaborative group share responsibility for the activating task of one member node, and the combination of these nodes’ wake-up schedules forms the full wake-up schedule of a node that only uses a pairwise method. In addition, this paper proposes a set of efficient group management mechanisms, and the key steps affecting energy efficiency are analyzed theoretically to obtain the energy-optimal parameters. The extended simulation experiments in multiple scenarios show that, compared with other methods, our neighbor discovery protocol based on virtual nodes (VN-NDP) has a significant improvement in average discovery delay and discovered neighbor percentage performance at a given energy budget. Compared with the typical indirect neighbor discovery algorithm EQS, a neighbor discovery with extended quorum system, our proposed VN-NDP method reduces the average discovery delay by up to and increases the discovered neighbor percentage by up to .

A neighbor discovery protocol with adaptive collision alleviation for wireless robotic networks

Neighbor discovery is the cornerstone of the mobile social applications over mobile ad hoc networks. Most current neighbor discovery protocols adopt a carefully designed wake-up/sleep schedule. However, a well-designed wake-up/sleep neighbor discovery schedule still might miss those neighbor nodes in the sleep state or discover undesirable neighbors with different purposes. Either results in inevitable discovery latency and unnecessary energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a flexible neighbor discovery protocol with social recognition under a passive discovery framework. In this framework, each mobile device is equipped with a wake-up radio. When a mobile node, called sponsor node, launches a neighbor detection, it will broadcast a wake-up radio signal before the hello message. Within a certain distance, the node will be triggered by its wake-up radio for a hello message, which is integrated with the social information. Furthermore, a flexible self-adjustment strategy is designed for the sponsor node to improve discovery-efficiency. Our protocol shows higher efficiency in both discovery latency and energy consumption than the traditional deterministic neighbor discovery protocols in the simulation.

In charge of several critical functionalities, the Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) is used by IPv6 nodes to find out nodes on the link, to learn their link-layer addresses to discover routers, and to preserve reachability information about the paths to active neighbors. Given its important and multifaceted role, security and efficiency must be ensured. However, NDP is vulnerable to critical attacks such as spoofing address, denial-of-service (DoS) and reply attack. Thus, in order to protect the NDP protocol, the Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) was designed. Nevertheless, SEND's protection still suffers from numerous threats and it is currently incompatible with the context of mobility and especially with the proxy Neighbor Discovery function used in Mobile IPv6. To overcome these limitations, this paper defines a new protocol named Improved Secure Neighbor Discovery (ISEND) which adapt SEND protocol to the context of mobility and extend it to new functionalities. The proposed protocol (ISEND) has been modeled and verified using the Security Protocol ANimator software (SPAN) for the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) which have proved that authentication goals are achieved. Hence, the scheme is safe and efficient when an intruder is present.

On multipacket reception based neighbor discovery in low-duty-cycle wireless sensor networks

We consider the problem of neighbor discovery in ad hoc network which is full duplex and uses directional antennas. Directional transmission is prerequisite for some ad hoc networking applications and makes the neighbor discovery less efficient than omni-directional broadcast. Full duplex enables simultaneous transmission and reception and facilitates the directional neighbor discovery. We present a simple one way handshaking algorithm and feasible decision rules for terminating the neighbor discovery procedure. The effect of transmission error and the collision on the algorithm is also considered. At the same time, the performance of the algorithm is analyzed. Lastly, simulations are given to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm.

Homes, offices and vehicles are getting networked. This will enable context aware, autonomous operation of many support systems that could be controlled remotely. To achieve this there would be a large number of tiny devices - sensors and actuators - which are networked and they are termed generally as Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In future, they will be powered through harvested energy from the ambience to enable perennial lifetime and minimal manual maintenance. Some examples of energy sources are photovoltaic panels and piezoelectric crystals. Several challenges arise due to the nature of sources of energy. One of these challenges is that the devices (nodes) leave and re-enter networks due to fluctuating availability of harvested energy. As a result, the neighbor table maintained at each node changes quite often leading to complications in forming and maintaining routes. In fact initial neighbor discovery (ND) itself is a difficult task. Further, usage of directional antennas would increase the time taken to complete ND. We study such a network through exhaustive simulation study considering various parameters. We demonstrate the benefits and challenges of using directional antennas for ND. We present a scheme that nodes could use to discover their neighbor during initial deployment and another scheme that could be used for subsequent discovery on re-entry into the network. We show that a dedicated ND protocol is necessary for energy harvesting networks and that directional ND is beneficial in these networks under some circumstances.