Neighbor Discovery and Rendezvous Maintenance with Extended Quorum Systems for Mobile Applications

In many mobile sensing applications, devices need to discover new neighbors and maintain the rendezvous with known neighbors continuously. Due to the limited energy supply, these devices have to duty cycle their radios to conserve the energy and bandwidth, making neighbor discovery and rendezvous maintenance even more challenging. To date, the main mechanism for device discover and rendezvous maintenance in existing solutions is pairwise, direct one-hop communication. We argue that such pairwise direct communication is sufficient but not necessary: there exist unnecessary active slots that can be eliminated, without affecting discovery and rendezvous. In this work, we propose a novel concept of extended quorum system, which leverages indirect discovery to further conserve energy. Specifically, we use quorum graph to capture all possible information flow paths where knowledge about known-neighbors can propagate among devices. By eliminating redundant paths, we can reduce the number of active slots significantly. Since a quorum graph can characterize arbitrary active schedules of mobile devices, our work can be broadly used to improve many existing quorum-based discovery and rendezvous solutions. We comprehensively evaluate EQS in three different scales of networks, and the results show that EQS reduces as much as 55 percent energy consumption with a maximal 5 percent increase in latency for existing solutions. To test the real-world values of EQS, we further propose a taxicab dispatching application called EQS-dispatch to navigate taxicab drivers to the area with less competition based on the discovery results of nearby taxicabs.