Low-power neighbor discovery for mobility-aware wireless sensor networks

While more and more deployments of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are successful, very few are actually mobility-aware. Due to their intermittent connectivity, mobile nodes induce certain instabilities, and thus, require to transmit multiple data packets in a short period of time. The nature of mobile nodes can lead to a link quality deterioration or even more to link disconnection. This instability requires frequent link establishments between a mobile and a neighboring static node before initiating data packet transmissions. To do so, the need for an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is extremely important and challenging. In this paper, we present MobiDisc, an advanced mobile-supporting scheme for low-power MAC protocols, which allows for efficient neighbor(hood) discovery and low-delay communication. Moreover, we propose a FAN (First Ack Next-hop) mode that accelerates transmissions. Both MobiDisc and MobiDisc-FAN come with a Fast Recovery Mechanism (FRM) that enables seamless handovers in the network. Our thorough performance evaluation, conducted on top of Contiki OS, shows that MobiDisc outperforms a number of state-of-the-art solutions (including MoX-MAC and ME-ContikiMAC), by terms of reducing both delay and energy consumption, while the reliability is kept over 98%.