SearchLight: asynchronous neighbor discovery using systematic probing

The usefulness of proximity-based social networking applications is limited by the lack of effective and energy efficient neighbor discovery protocols. While probabilistic approaches perform well for the average case, they exhibit long tails resulting in high upper bounds on neighbor discovery latency. On the other hand, recent deterministic protocols like Disco and U-Connect improve on the worst case bound, but do so by sacrificing average case performance. In response to these limitations, we present Searchlight, an asynchronous neighbor discovery protocol that combines both deterministic and probabilistic components, and thereby achieves an average case performance comparable to the probabilistic approaches while improving on the deterministic worst case bounds.