Generic neighbor discovery accelerations in mobile applications

Abstract

As a supporting primitive of many mobile applications, neighbor discovery identifies nearby devices so that they can exchange information and collaborate in a peer-to-peer manner. To date, discovery schemes trade a long latency for energy efficiency and require a collaborative duty cycle pattern, and thus they are not suitable for interactive mobile applications where a user is unable to configure others' devices. In this article, we propose Acc, which serves as an on-demand generic discovery accelerating middleware for many deterministic neighbor discovery schemes. Acc leverages the discovery capabilities of neighbor devices, supporting both direct and indirect neighbor discoveries. Further, we present a proactive online rendezvous maintenance mechanism, which is used to reduce delays for the detection of leaving of neighbors. Our evaluations show that Acc-assisted discovery schemes reduce latency by up to 51.8% compared to schemes consuming the same amount of energy. More importantly, to prove the real-world value of Acc, we further present and evaluate a Crowd-Alert application where Acc is employed by taxi drivers to accelerate selection of a direction with fewer competing taxis and more potential passengers, based on a 280GB dataset of more than 14,000 taxis in Shenzhen, the most crowded city in China.