Distributed Group-Based Mobility Management Scheme in Wireless Body Area Networks

Moneeb Gohar,Ruba Suliman M Alowaid,Jin-Ghoo Choi,Hind Ahmed M Alrubaish

doi:10.1155/2017/4180801

Abstract

For group-based mobility management in 6LoWPAN-based wireless body area networks (WBAN), some schemes using the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP) have been proposed. However, the existing PMIP-based mobility schemes tend to induce large registration delay and handover delay. To overcome such limitations, we propose a new distributed group-based mobility management scheme, in which the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) function is implemented by each Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) and the handover operation is performed between two neighboring MAGs without the help of LMA. Besides, each MAG maintains the information of the group of mobile sensors and aggregates the Authentication-Authorization-Accounting (AAA) query messages for a group of mobile sensors as a “single” message to decrease the control overhead. By numerical analysis, it is shown that the proposed scheme can reduce the registration and handover delays, compared to the existing PMIP-based mobility schemes.

Highlights

World population growth is facing challenges like increase of life expectancy leading to aging population and rise in healthcare costs
The standard Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP)-based scheme has a drawback that a lot of DeReg, Proxy Binding Update (PBU), and Proxy Binding Ack (PBA) messages are exchanged between Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) and Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) (p-MAG and nMAG) for all body sensors
This is because the proposed scheme uses the LMA functionality over MAG, and the PBU and PBA operations are not required between LMA and MAG

Summary

Introduction

World population growth is facing challenges like increase of life expectancy leading to aging population and rise in healthcare costs. Several schemes have been proposed to support mobility in the 6LoWPAN-based WBAN [10, 11], which usually use the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP) protocol [12]. These schemes reduce the registration and handover delays, but there remains much room for improvement in the delay performance. We propose an enhanced group-based mobility scheme for 6LoWPAN-based WBAN by using the distributed PMIP approach so as to further reduce registration and handover delays.

Related Works

Existing Group-Based Mobility Schemes for Comparison

Distributed Group-Based Mobility Management Scheme

Performance Analysis

Numerical Results and Discussion

Conclusions