FM‐MAC: A fast‐mobility adaptive MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks

AbstractAs a subset of the internet of things, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly composed of mobile nodes (MNs) to meet the emerging needs. However, nodes mobility presents significant challenges to the design of effective communication protocols, especially at the medium access control (MAC) sublayer. Interestingly, the existing mobility support MAC solutions consider only scenarios requiring slow mobility. Nowadays, some WSN applications require employing high‐speed MNs for some specific tasks. Consequently, the mobility impact is sharp as the existing solutions could no longer guarantee the quality‐of‐service requirements. To deal with high‐speed mobility, we propose in this paper a fast‐mobility adaptive MAC (FM‐MAC) protocol. The FM‐MAC protocol adopts the contention‐based access approach and introduces new mechanisms to enhance both mobility and communication management in WSNs. Our proposal consists of four contributions, ie, (1) an improved algorithm for autonomous mobility‐detection, (2) a new intercluster handover mechanism, (3) a priority‐based contention mechanism prioritizing MNs to access the medium, and finally, (4) a multichannel communication strategy intended to enhance the throughput and communication management aspects. Extensive simulations are conducted to compare FM‐MAC protocol with existing well‐known mobility‐aware MAC protocols. Results and discussion disclose that FM‐MAC performs better in both static and mobile scenarios in terms of reliability, latency, and energy saving. As expected, the advantage of FM‐MAC over its counterparts becomes more evident as the mobility speed increases.