Controlling the Handoff Procedure in an Oil Refinery Environment Using Fuzzy Logic

Mobility is one of the most important challenges in a wireless sensor system. Usually, continuous connectivity of a Mobile Node (MN) is achieved by supporting handoff from one connection point to another. In order to guarantee reliability and seamless communications to a MN, it is important to avoid unnecessary handoffs occurring during a short period of time. In this paper, we present a mobility management solution that is applied to a network operating in an oil refinery environment. The proposed mobility solution is supported by fuzzy logic techniques in order to keep the number of handoff triggers to low values and at the same time to provide high reliability. The performance evaluation of the proposed fuzzy-based solution and the conventional Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) based method shows that the proposed solution manages to increase the reliability of the system and at the same time reduce the handoff overhead.