Mobility-aware timeout medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), has been under development for a while by the academia and industry. Due to limited computational power, a typical sensor node may experience operational challenges. Moreover, mobility has become an important feature since emergency and healthcare related applications are evolving in WSNs. Consideration of mobile nodes in WSNs introduce new challenges for the designers. In this paper, an enhanced version of T-MAC protocol (a well-known medium access control protocol in WSNs) known as MT-MAC is proposed. Using the capturing fluctuation in RSSI and LQI values of the received SYNC packets, MT-MAC solves high packet drop ratio in T-MAC. By detecting the mobility, a mobile node softly handover to a new virtual cluster without losing connection with other nodes. The performance of the proposed solution is then compared with T-MAC, S-MAC as well as other well-known mobility-aware MAC (MS-MAC) protocol. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol significantly increases the throughput and packet delivery ratio of T-MAC in exchange for a small increase in power consumption. Compared to MS-MAC protocol, the proposed approach can reduce power consumption by 20–65%, and achieve slightly higher packet delivery ratio.