Intra-mobility for Hospital Wireless Sensor Networks Based on 6LoWPAN

Low-power personal area networks (LoWPANs) are still in its early stage of development, but the range of conceivable usage scenarios is tremendous. The numerous possible applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) make obvious that mesh and multi-technology topologies will be prevalent in LoWPAN environments and mobility support will be a necessity. Mobility based communication can prolong the lifetime of devices and increase the connectivity between nodes and clusters. Using distributed LoWPANs is possible to sculpt the devices density to cluster around areas of interest, cover large areas, and work more efficiently. The required mobility is heavily dependent on the individual service scenario and the LoWPAN architecture, for that reason in this paper is defined a mobility protocol for clinical environments. This paper presents an intra-mobility protocol for Hospital Wireless Sensor Networks based on 6LoWPAN, where we have defined a protocol optimized for our continuous vital signs monitoring architecture. This protocol presents how to exploit the other elements of the architecture with high capacity and resources (6LoWPAN Border Router, gateways etc.) to reduce latency, power consumption and the number of interchanged messages with respect to other solutions such as Mobile IP (MIPv6).