MobiSense: Power-efficient micro-mobility in wireless sensor networks

Emerging applications in industrial automation as well as tracking and monitoring applications of humans, objects or animals share common requirements: micro-mobility, high-throughput, and two-way end-to-end communications. In this paper we present MobiSense, a MAC layer and routing architecture for micro-mobility environments providing reliable and energy-efficient communication and low-latency handoffs. MobiSense's energy-efficiency and reliability comes from a set of carefully chosen design elements: rapid network information gathering, rapid network (re)admission and convergence, distributed network formation, and dynamic scheduling. Testbed evaluations show that a mobile sensor achieves: (i) reliability above 95% even in scenarios with high data rates of 6pps/node; (ii) low latency-handoffs typically below 1 second; (iii) a high aggregate system throughput of more than 95kbps; (iv) two-way communication without the need for flooding; and (v) communication at very low duty-cycles below 4% at 6pps/node.