An Energy-Efficient Mobility-Supporting MAC Protocol for Mobile Sensor Networks

In this paper, we design an adaptive mobility-supporting MAC (AM-MAC) protocol for mobile sensor networks. In our protocol, as in S-MAC [1], each virtual cluster that consists of a subset of sensor nodes has its own listen-sleep schedule. Hence, when a mobile sensor node moves into a new virtual cluster, it needs to adapt to the listen-sleep schedule of the corresponding virtual cluster in a timely and energy efficient manner. To this end, in our protocol, we utilize schedule information on border nodes between virtual clusters. This allows us to implement fast and energy efficient listen-sleep schedule adaptation for mobile nodes, which consists of two main functions: energy efficient secondary listen period and smart scheduling adaptation. Simulation results show that our protocol can provide fast schedule adaptation while achieving energy efficiency.