A performance study of mobile nodes in a Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) protocols have to answer the limited capacities of sensor nodes. Routing protocols generate a considerable amount of traffic when nodes are mobile and thus contribute to the energy consumption and to the overloading of the medium with control traffic. The ZigBee standard proposes a lightweight hierarchical routing protocol that does not cope well with mobility as shown in the literature. In this paper, we extend a novel opportunistic approach based on the ZigBee standard to which we added functionalities that handles mobility in WSN. Critical periodical information transmitted by mobile nodes is routed through a fixed multi-hop tree topology towards a sink connected to a control station. We evaluate the protocol using the NS-2 simulator.