Efficient mobility management in 6LoWPAN wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) represent one of the most exciting today's research areas. Their utility ranges from causal sensing and data collection to mission critical applications such as battle field control, medical assistance, and natural disaster forecasting. With all the constraints related to WSNs, and with the urgent need to provide connectivity between sensor networks and the Internet, a new IETF Working Group, namely 6LoWPAN, was created. This group opens up a wealth of application opportunities as well as a number of difficult challenges. One of these challenges is the efficient support of sensor mobility. This paper proposes a mobility management scheme for IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Net-work (6LoWPAN) sensor nodes. We propose FPMIPv6-S (Fast handover Proxy Mobile IPv6 for Sensor networks), an improved version of the protocol PMIPv6, a protocol recently adopted as an RFC to support mobility in IPv6 based networks. We present a performance comparison of FPMIPv6-S with PFMIPv6, a recently proposed modification to PMIPv6 using an analytical approach. Performance results show that FPMIPv6-S exhibits a significantly lower number of messages exchanged and handoff latency, thus extending the network lifetime.