Infrastructure-supported Mobility in Wireless Sensor Networks - A Case Study

Mobility support is one of the main requirements in current wireless sensor networks (WSN), as WSN technology becomes mature and its range of applications gets wider. Due to the very nature of WSNs, along with their use in all sorts of Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, it is frequent that sensor nodes, or even groups of sensor nodes, need to change their wireless point of attachment without losing connectivity. Nevertheless, mobility support in WSNs has not yet been standardized and, therefore, mobility is still looked at as a challenge. This is even more so in critical, industrial scenarios. In this paper we present and evaluate a new infrastructure-based mobility solution for WSNs, named Network of Proxies (NoP), developed for the referred type of scenarios. NoP was deployed and tested in a critical use case, namely for monitoring employees' vital signs status in an oil refinery, with the aim of evaluating its feasibility and performance. The results show that NoP is capable of efficiently handling mobility, outperforming existing solutions and meeting the stringent case-study requirements.