Energy-efficient and mobility-aware MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have restricted use by both academic and industrial societies for a while. This is due to the limited electrical and computational power of a typical sensor node. By moving toward emergency and healthcare related applications such as the disaster response, mobility has become an important feature of WSNs. Having the mobile nodes in a WSNs causes new and even more challenging technical difficulties for its designers. The existing technologies should be revised in order to comply to the new form of applications. In this paper, an enhanced mobility-aware extension to T-MAC, as one of the popular medium access control protocols in WSNs is proposed. The simulation-based experiments show that the proposed method significantly increases the throughput and packet delivery ratio of T-MAC in exchange for a small increase in power consumption.