Reliable Data Collection with Mobile Sink Using Seamless Handover in Duty Cycled Based WSNs

Providing successful data collection in transmitter-initiated wireless sensor networks with mobile Sink (WSN-MS) scenarios is a primary goal of a myriad of critical applications in real world. Unfortunately, the problem of broken links which may occur during data transmission between a source node and a mobile Sink may cause inevitably incomplete data collection. To overcome this challenging issue, we propose in this paper a seamless handover mechanism performed on asynchronous duty cycled MAC protocol on the basis of neighborhood information. By measuring continuously the signal quality of ACKnowledgment messages of transmitted Data during a 1-hop communication, this mechanism allows the source node to continue transmitting data to the mobile Sink using a suitable neighbor node as relay in the case where the Sink node leaves the radio range in direction of that neighbor node. The asynchronous protocol XMAC (without handover) has been chosen as a basic protocol on which we designed our contribution named HXMAC (XMAC with handover). The later was implemented and evaluated using a powerful simulation tool. Experimental results based on the comparison between HXMAC and XMAC clearly showed that handover mechanism is a suitable technique to promote significantly reliability in WSN-MS data collection operation.