Study of mobility effect on energy efficiency in medium access control protocols

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) became popular in recent years, with big variety of applications from environmental monitoring to disaster recovery. Energy efficiency is a key characteristic of todays wireless sensors. In energy constraint sensor network, mobility handling can cause some additional challenges in sensor protocol design. Recently there are many MAC protocols have been proposed and adopted specially for sensor networks. Most of the proposed MAC protocols in wireless sensor network assumed nodes to be static. However some application like medical care and disaster response make use of mobile sensors essential. In this paper, we take closer look at S-MAC, T-MAC (which are well-known energy efficient MAC protocols) and IEEE 802.15.4 (which is the ZigBee standard) MAC protocols and studies their performance in terms of energy efficiency in different situation of mobility.