Neighbour discovery in opportunistic networks

Continuous or frequent scanning for opportunistic encounters would quickly drain the battery on existing personal mobile wireless devices. Furthermore, there is a great deal of uncertainty about when encounters between devices carried by humans will take place. This paper will discuss some of the drawbacks of using current short range neighbour discovery technology in opportunistic networks. Finally, we proposes a new neighbour discovery algorithm called PISTONSv2 which enables mobile devices to dynamically alter the rate at which they search for others, thus creating a fully decentralised and autonomous network whilst saving energy.