MoMoRo: Providing Mobility Support for Low-Power Wireless Applications

Abstract

Recently, mobile devices have been introduced in various wireless sensor network (WSN) applications in order to solve complex tasks or to increase the data collection efficiency. However, the current generation of low-power WSN protocols is mainly designed to support data collection and address application-specific challenges without any particular considerations for mobility. In this paper, we introduce MoMoRo, a mobility support layer that can be easily applied to existing data collection protocols, thereby enabling mobility support in the network. MoMoRo robustly collects neighborhood information and uses a fuzzy estimator to make link quality estimations. This fuzzy estimator continuously reconfigures its thresholds for determining the fuzzy sets, allowing MoMoRo to easily adapt to changing channel environments. Furthermore, MoMoRo includes an active destination search scheme that allows disconnected mobile nodes with sparse traffic to quickly reconnect if there are packets in the network destined to this mobile node. We evaluate MoMoRo both indoor and outdoor and show that a continuously moving device in a MoMoRo-enabled RPL (i.e., IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) network can achieve a high packet reception ratio of up to 96% and stay connected in areas where RPL alone cannot and with less than half the packet overhead needed by the well-known Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector routing protocol.