An energy-efficient mobility-supporting MAC protocol in wireless sensor networks

Although mobile applications are an essential characteristic of wireless sensor networks, most existing media access control (MAC) protocols focus primarily on static networks. In these protocols, fixed periodic neighbor discovery and schedule updating are used to connect and synchronize neighbors to provide successful data transmission; however, they cannot adapt to mobile speed variation and degrade the network performance dramatically. In this paper, we propose a mobile-supporting mechanism for MAC protocols, in which the decision to update the neighbors of a mobile node is made adaptively according to the mobile speed. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the mechanism efficiently avoids the disconnection of a mobile node from its neighbors and achieves a better performance as compared with fixed periodic neighbor discovery.