Improving passive discovery for IEEE 802.15.4-based mobile body sensor networks

Abstract

We investigate passive discovery of IEEE 802.15.4-based body sensor networks (BSNs). BSNs are wearable networks that monitor the vital functions of the body while the person can roam around freely. One challenging task that BSNs have to perform is the discovery of certain coordinator nodes, for example, gateways towards data processing and storage services. We are presenting a cooperative passive discovery scheme (the rumour-based scheme) for the beacon-enabled mode. We consider a simple scenario where a specific mobile BSN is searching for a specific destination network. We evaluate the performance of our scheme in terms of the average discovery time and the discovery probability using simulations. We also assess the influence of some important system parameters, e.g. the speed of mobile BSNs, the beacon order, the mobility model or the number of nodes used for discovery. The results show that our strategy can significantly reduce the time required to discover the target network.

Keywords:

• Mobile body sensor networks
• IEEE 802.15.4
• network discovery
• performance evaluation

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

1. We make the simplistic assumption that the fixed PANs are aware of themselves being fixed by a mechanism outside the scope of this paper.