Impact of sensor nodes scaling and velocity on handover mechanisms for healthcare wireless sensor networks with mobility support

•Reviews the related literature about the most relevant available handover approaches.•Presentation of a new handover mechanism, called Hand4MAC.•Performance assessment of the most significant handover mechanisms in comparison with Hand4MAC, considering different healthcare scenarios (Hand4MAC, RSSI-based, and Backbone-based).•Influence analyzes of the number of sensor nodes and their velocity on the network connectivity and energy consumption.

Health promotion in hospital environments can be improved using the most recent information and communication technologies. The Internet connectivity to small sensor nodes carried by patients allows remote access to their bio-signals. To promote these features the healthcare wireless sensor networks (HWSN) are used. In these networks mobility support is a key issue in order to keep patients under real-time monitoring even when they move around. To keep sensors connected to the network, they should change their access points of attachment when patients move to a new coverage area along an infirmary. This process, called handover, is responsible for continuous network connectivity to the sensors. This paper presents a detailed performance evaluation study considering three handover mechanisms for healthcare scenarios (Hand4MAC, RSSI-based, and Backbone-based). The study was performed by simulation using several scenarios with different number of sensors and different moving velocities of sensor nodes. The results show that Hand4MAC is the best solution to guarantee almost continuous connectivity to sensor nodes with less energy consumption.

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