A Novel Approach for Combining Micro and Macro Mobility in 6LoWPAN Enabled Networks

Industrial applications of IEEE 802.15.4 networks require autonomous network reconfiguration and high mobility support. Therefore, dynamic meshing in case of node failures or changing environmental influences is needed as well as handover strategies when nodes change network domains. Recently a growing number of low rated, low power sensor nodes are deployed within Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to support e.g. data acquisition and transmission. Therefore, this work focuses on a mobility management to combine micro and macro mobility aspects in form of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) protocols and Mobile Internet Protocol Version 6 (MIPv6) without changing the original MIPv6 stack. In addition to that the application of 6LoWPAN is addressed to make efficient data transmission feasible within embedded devices by IPv6 header compression which increases resulting payloads significantly. Finally, our approach is validated within a real world industrial simulation environment by combining the protocol simulator OMNeT++ with a ray tracing tool.