Efficient cluster mobility support for tdma-based mac protocols in wireless sensor networks
article
Node mobility is a key feature of using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in many sensory applications, such as healthcare. The Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol should properly support the mobility in the network. In particular, mobility is complicated for contention-free protocols like Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA). An efficient access to the sharedmedium is scheduled based on the node's local neighborhood. This neighborhood may vary over time due to node movement or other dynamics. In scenarios including bodyarea networking, for instance, some clusters of nodes move together, creating further challenges but also opportunities. This article presents a MAC protocol, MCMAC, that provides efficient support for cluster mobility in TDMA-based MAC protocols in WSNs. The proposed protocol exploits a hybrid contentionfree and contention-based communication approach to support cluster mobility. This relieves the protocol from rescheduling demand due to frequent node movements. Moreover, we propose a listening scheduling mechanism to avoid idle listening to mobile nodes that leads to a considerable energy saving for sensor nodes. The protocol is validated by performing several experiments in a real-world large-scale deployment including several mobile clusters. The protocol is also evaluated by extensive simulation of networks with various scales and configurations. cop. 2014 ACM.
Topics
TNO Identifier
507106
ISSN
15504867
Source
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 10(4)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Article nr.
65
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