IEEE COMMUNICATIONS SURVEYS & TUTORIALS, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION 1 A Survey on Mobility and Mobility-Aware MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract—In wireless sensor networks nodes can be static or mobile, depending on the application requirements. Dealing with mobility can pose some formidable challenges in protocol design, particularly, at the link layer. These difficulties require mobility adaptation algorithms to localize mobile nodes and predict the quality of link that can be established with them. This paper surveys the current state-of-art in handling mobility. It first describes existing mobility models and patterns; and analyzes the challenges caused by mobility at the link layer. It then provides a comparative study of several mobility-aware MAC protocols. Index Terms—MAC protocols, mobility, handover, wireless sensor networks, survey