A Novel Adaptive Mobility-Aware MAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent boom of mobile applications has become a novel essential characteristic in wireless sensor networks. However, existing MAC protocols mainly focus on static network. To support mobility, some MAC protocols expedite or adjust the schedule frequency of neighbor discovery but suffer from increased latency and energy consumption since they are not adaptive in time. In this paper, we propose a mobile-supporting MAC protocols that the decision to update neighbors of the mobile node is made adaptively in advance. Simulation results demonstrate that the mechanism is efficient to avoid disconnection from mobile node to its neighbors and performs better in terms of main performance parameters: energy efficiency, delay and packet loss compared with the S-MAC, M-MAC and MS-MAC that are popular MAC protocols used in scenarios involving mobile nodes.