SEEK Mobility Adaptive Protocol Destination Seeker Media Access Control Protocol for Mobile WSNs

The mobile wireless sensor network (WSN) is an emerging field as it widens the scope of applications where sensor networks can be applied. Generally, mobility in wireless communications degrades how well each pair of nodes communicate with one another. In WSN, the effect is higher because nodes have limited communication and computational capabilities. Those limitations create a challenging environment for the operation of sensor node communications. This paper proposes an energy-efficient media access control (MAC) protocol with mobility adaptive throughput based on a carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance MAC mechanism called the SEEK-mobility adaptive protocol (SEEK-MADP). SEEK-MADP uses a unique control packet operation to transfer data packets through as many nodes as possible in one duty cycle. The control packets, SYNC and RTS, are merged into one packet (SEEK). SEEK is then transferred to the downstream nodes to establish a connection between a stream of nodes in a duty cycle. This process minimizes the energy consumed by the handshaking process between the connected nodes. To increase throughput, the data period is adaptive to minimize/maximize the data packets according to the movement speed of the sender/receiver nodes. The proposed algorithm is assessed via extensive simulations in mobile scenarios using Network Simulator version 2. The final results show that the SEEK-MADP outperforms MAC protocols, sensor MAC (S-MAC), and SMAC with adaptive listening, which have shown good performance in mobile scenarios. The performance of the proposed algorithm is better than that of IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC mechanism at mobile scenarios.