Mobility Management Solutions in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

A number of sensor network applications are envisioned to be applied to industry settings where the existence of mobile nodes (MN) is required. In critical applications, the realtime monitoring of a MN must always be available, something that requires the existence of a suitable mobility protocol to control the handoff procedure. In this paper, we use an industrial WSN setting to perform a comprehensive performance evaluation of different mobility handling solutions based on single- and multiple-metric options. The results show that Fuzzy Logic-based Mobility Controller (FLMC), the multiple-metric approach we used (based on Fuzzy Logic), performs better compared to any single metric-based approach under a varying set of conditions. More specifically, we demonstrate that the Fuzzy Logic -based approach can efficiently control the handoff triggering procedure and provide high reliability (low packet loss) under different mobility models, different radio propagation models, and different topologies.