An Initial Approach to Support Mobility in Hospital Wireless Sensor Networks based on 6LoWPAN (HWSN6)

Low-power personal area networks (LoWPANs) are still in its early stage of development, but the range of conceivable usage scenarios is tremendous. The numerous possible applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) make obvious that mesh and multi-technology topologies will be prevalent in LoWPAN environments and mobility is one of the most important issues in the Future Networks. Mobility based communication can prolong the lifetime of devices, increase the connectivity between nodes and clusters, and support fault tolerance. Using distributed LoWPANs is possible to sculpt the devices density to cluster around areas of interest, cover large areas, and work more efficiently. The required mobility is heavily dependent on the individual service scenario and the LoWPAN architecture. For that reason in this paper is presented a mobility protocol oriented to clinical environments. This protocol is based on our monitoring architecture oriented for continuous vital signs monitoring. Thereby, it has been defined and optimized to exploit the other elements of the architecture with high capacity and resources (6LoWPAN Border Router and gateways) to reduce latency and node’s overload with respect to other IPv6 mobility solutions such as Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6).