Mobility solutions for wireless sensor and actuator networks with performance guarantees

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) have been studied for about ten years now. However, a gap between research and real applications and implementations remains. The lack of an integrated solution, capable of providing the reliability levels of monitoring and actuation required by critical applications, have postponed the replacement and extension of the existing inflexible and expensive wired solutions with the low-cost, easy-to-deploy, and portable wireless options. In order to assist this transition this paper presents a new method for supporting mobility in WSANs specifically designed for time-critical scenarios. The method is being targeted for a critical application located in a real oil refinery, in which a WSAN has been implemented in the scope of a European research project.