IEEE 802.15.4 MAC-based Location-ID Exchange Protocol for Realizing Micro-Cell Connectionless Location-Awareness Services

We propose ID-exchange protocol for Connectionless Location-Awareness Service (CLAS) to locate mobile nodes in indoor sensor network. When adapting location-awareness service to sensor network, the target system must be designed in accordance with various metrics which reflect the system requirement. We especially consider sustainability of the existing service which has been provided for its original purpose, such as environmental monitoring. The detailed meaning of sustainability here is that, even if location-awareness service is newly added to the existing service, the system must be assured to retain a stable network condition, and to deal with newly caused traffic properly. The CLAS ID-exchange protocol is especially designed for fixture and mobile nodes communication to achieve these properties. The protocol operates on 802.15.4 MAC layer to make mobile node work independently of the procedure to build routing table of fixture node, so a stable routing condition can be achieved even if there are many mobile nodes. Moreover, the dedicated frequency channel is assigned only for this protocol, so that traffic caused by location-awareness service can be distributed to another channel. A real system adapting the protocol was implemented to monitor fire and authorities’ positions. We verified the overhead and elapsed time for location-awareness. The result shows the proposed protocol has a high performance in detecting speed, traffic distribution, and stability of overall network.