Patent ID: 8750261

Claim:
A method of operating a communication device in a peer-to-peer network, comprising: receiving a first peer discovery signal in a first peer discovery interval of a series of peer discovery intervals occurring in said peer-to-peer network, wherein the first peer discovery signal is generated by a first wireless terminal using a predetermined hash function; generating an expected signal using a known identifier from a stored list of known identifiers based on the predetermined hash function which uses as inputs said known identifier and a hash function input value corresponding to the first peer discovery interval in which the first peer discovery signal was received, said hash function input value varying as a function of time between successive peer discovery intervals; and generating a first value which is a probability that a wireless terminal corresponding to the known identifier used to generate the expected signal is present in a vicinity of the communication device, said generating a first value including comparing the received first peer discovery signal with the generated expected signal to determine a presence of the first wireless terminal corresponding to the known identifier in a vicinity.