Wireless sensor networks mobility management using fuzzy logic

This paper presents a novel, intelligent controller to support mobility in wireless sensor networks. In particular, the focus is on the deployment of such mobility solution to critical applications, like personnel safety in an industrial environment. A Fuzzy Logic-based mobility controller is proposed to aid sensor Mobile Nodes (MN) to decide whether they have to trigger the handoff procedure and perform the handoff to a new connection position or not. To do so, we use a combination of two locally available metrics, the RSSI and the Link Loss, in order to predict the End-to-End losses and support the handoff triggering procedure. As a performance evaluation environment, a real industrial setting (oil refinery) is used. Based on on-site experiments run in the oil refinery testbed area, the proposed mobility controller has shown significant benefits compared to other conventional solutions, in terms of packet loss, packet delivery delay, energy consumption, and ratio of successful handoff triggers. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.