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An Evaluation Study of Mobility Support in ZigBee Networks

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Abstract

Based on the IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN specification, the ZigBee standard has been proposed to interconnect simple, low rate, and battery powered wireless devices. The deployment of ZigBee networks is expected to facilitate numerous applications, such as home healthcare, medical monitoring, consumer electronics, and environmental sensors. For many of the envisioned applications, device mobility is unavoidable and must be accommodated. Thus, providing ubiquitous connections to/from a mobile device is crucial for various future ZigBee applications. Knowledge of how nodal mobility affects the ZigBee routing protocol is important, but the lack of ZigBee simulator support has limited the amount of research, evaluation, and development in this area. Thus far, researchers have been unable to analyze and evaluate the impact of mobile applications via extensive simulations. In this paper, our contribution is threefold. First, we present an initial implementation of the ZigBee network layer in NS-2, which will allow further research and development to be conducted in this area. Second, we analyze the adequacy of current provisions for dealing with different mobility cases. Third, we provide a comprehensive set of simulation results that demonstrate the inefficacy of the current standard for handling mobility. Our results show that the ZigBee device plays a significant role in determining the routing performance in mobile scenarios.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. This paper is based on work supported by the National Science Council under grant number NSC 95-2218-E-002-072 and the National Science Foundation under grant number ANI-0335302.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    Ling-Jyh Chen

  2. PacketMotion, Inc., San Jose, CA, USA

    Tony Sun

  3. Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

    Nia-Chiang Liang

Authors
  1. Ling-Jyh Chen
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  2. Tony Sun
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  3. Nia-Chiang Liang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ling-Jyh Chen.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the 2007 IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC 2007) [9]. Since then, the paper has undergone a major extension. Specifically, we have incorporated all the comments/ suggestions of the conference attendees into this version, and expanded nearly all the sections (especially Sections 1, 2, 3, and 4). As a result, this journal submission is a much more thorough and authoritative presentation of our work.

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Chen, LJ., Sun, T. & Liang, NC. An Evaluation Study of Mobility Support in ZigBee Networks. J Sign Process Syst Sign Image Video Technol 59, 111–122 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0271-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-008-0271-x

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