Routing Protocol Enhancement for Mobility Support in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) technology is attracting more attention with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). Wireless sensor networks have been intensively studied for optimizing their life time by enhancing their low power operations. Few studies have been developed in order to deal with mobility. In some cases, nodes move around a specific area and the network topology should adapt fast. Routing protocols should react to topology changes and build new routes. Traditionally, control traffic is used to update routing metrics. Each node will then choose a next-hop among its neighbor nodes based on this routing metric. In this paper, we propose an enhancement based on signal strength monitoring and depth updating in order to improve the routing protocol performance in mobility scenarios where all nodes are moving. This enhancement can be integrated into most data collection routing protocols. It helps them to better cope with mobility and to make faster decisions on updating their next-hop neighbors. We also implemented this enhancement in the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). We show that through simulations using our technique allows better performance for different routing metrics.