A Handover Triggering Algorithm for Managing Mobility in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks are useful for a large number of healthcare applications which require mobile nodes. Most existing applications rely on body area networks (BAN) which require the presence of additional devices, such as mobile phones, to transfer data from the BAN to a remote base station or a server. In this paper we propose to extend BAN with personal area networks (PAN) so that enhanced mobility and seamless collection of data can be possible. In order to improve the reliability of this merge and support a high goodput, we also propose a seamless handover mechanism which enables mobile transmitters to discover and transfer communication to reliable relay nodes when the quality of an existing link deteriorates. In this paper we shall report how we implemented our scheme for TinyOS and TelosB platforms and compared it with four other competitive schemes.