MASQOTS

Mobility mAnagement in wireless Sensor networks under Quality-of-service constraints using standard and Off-The-Shelf technologies

	FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-014922 PTDC/EEA-TEL/112220/2009 42 months (Feb 2011 to Jun 2014) http://www.cister.isep.ipp.pt/masqots/
Summary:	MASQOTS aims at real-time and reliable communications in IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee (15.4/ZigBee, for short) Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) supporting physical mobility. Physical mobility concerns mobile sensor/actuator nodes and node groups (e.g. body sensor networks (BSNs), robots), and also mobile sinks (e.g. gateways, user-interface equipment). A growing set of WSN applications impose timeliness, reliability and mobility requirements. One relevant example is patients’ health monitoring systems in hospitals. There is an eagerness to have hospitals covered by WSN infrastructures and patients/medical staff to wear BSNs. Patients wear BSNs to be monitored (vital signs) and tracked, even while moving between rooms. Medical staff wears BSNs be tracked and warned about emergency situations and to measure stress levels. WSN-based patient monitoring systems have enormous social and economical benefits, drawing great investments from companies and funding agencies (e.g. NSF, EC) worldwide. These systems have the potential to reduce the number of patients’ deaths, the number of patients in Intensive Care Units and requiring transfer from peripheral to central hospitals, the stress levels of medical staff and patients’ families and “bed-side cabling”. They also enable patients’ mobility, but impose reliable and real-time communications. Despite the ongoing efforts to standardize BSNs (namely IEEE 802.15.6), most commercial and academic solutions build upon ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) based protocols such as IEEE 802.11/WiFi and 15.4/ZigBee. Due to the relatively high number/density of sensing/communicating nodes in these applications, low-power low-cost WSN/BSN seem to be the appropriate approach. However, existing solutions do not support scalable, low-power, low-cost, reliable, real-time and mobile communications, which we aim at. The main objective of this project is to desing a real-time and reliable mobility management mechanism for IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee-based WSNs. We will build upon the most widespread WSN technologies – the 15.4 and ZigBee protocols and the TinyOS operating system (OS) – for which the research team in this proposal is international leader. OnWorld predicts that in 2012, 88.3% of the WSN units will be standards-based. Freescale reports over 7 million 15.4/ZigBee units sold in 2008 and In-Stat forecasts 292 million units in 2012. TinyOS is the most used OS for WSNs. Supporting reliable and real-time communications in WSNs is challenging. Radio interference, environmental characteristics and nodes mobility turn radio links unpredictable, leading to message error/losses. This is more acute for low-cost low-power nodes operating in an increasingly crowded 2.4 GHz ISM band (e.g. WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, cordless phones, microwave ovens). Encompassing physical mobility under stringent reliability and timeliness requirements is even harder. Existing works on 15.4/ZigBee-based WSNs supporting physical mobility are either inconclusive or have timeliness and reliability problems. MASQOTS will address some fundamental (not yet solved) problems, such as the ones related to reliable Radio Link Quality Estimation (LQE), efficient and dynamic resource management, reliable and time-bounded handoff and re-association mechanisms and the provision of (simulation, analytical) models/tools for WSN analysis and dimensioning.
Funding:	Global: 94.8KEUR, CISTER: 94.8KEUR
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Contact Person at CISTER:	Mário Alves

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Thesis

Fast mobility support in low-power wireless networks: smart-HOP over RPL/6LoWPAN CISTER-TR-130703
Daniel Moreira

MASQOTS

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MASQOTS