Mobility management for 6LoWPAN WSN

When a wireless node moves across different IP domains, it needs to perform both the handover in the link layer (L2) and the handover in the network layer (L3). The L2 handover is responsible for the channel switch, and the L3 handover takes charge of the IP address change to ensure the communication correctness. The L2 handover and the L3 handover are two independent processes which are performed in series, so the total handover delay is equal to the sum of the L2 handover delay which is mainly caused by channel scanning and the L3 handover delay which is primarily incurred by care-of address (CoA) configuration. This considerable total handover latency causes severe packet loss, so it is significant to reduce the total handover latency. This paper proposes a cross-layering mobility management scheme to reduce the total handover delay and it has the following contributions: (1) This scheme combines the L3 handover with the L2 one so that they can be performed in parallel. (2) A CoA is pre-configured and the channel information is acquired in advance so that the L3 handover can be achieved without CoA configuration and the L2 handover can be performed without channel scanning. The performance of this scheme is evaluated, and the results show that this scheme effectively reduces the total handover latency.