Passive discovery of IEEE 802.15.4-based body sensor networks

In this paper we study passive discovery of IEEE 802.15.4 networks operating in the beacon-enabled mode. The task of discovery occurs in different scenarios. One example is a simple device that wishes to associate with a specific, pre-specified PAN coordinator (targeted discovery). Another example are opportunistic relaying applications, where arbitrary foreign coordinators should be discovered (untargeted discovery). We consider a simple class of listening strategies and provide different analytical models which allow to find optimal strategies for different listening scenarios. For the case of targeted discovery without constraints on the listening costs we give a dynamic programming formulation, for targeted discovery with bounded costs we present and validate a simple model and derive the desired performance measures. For untargeted discovery we present simulation results in a mobile scenario.