A good mobility model is an essential prerequisite for performance evaluation of protocols for wireless networks with node mobility. Sensor nodes in a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) exhibit high mobility. The WBAN topology may completely change because of posture changes and movement even within a certain type of posture. The WBAN also moves as a whole in an ambient network. Therefore, an appropriate mobility model is of great importance for performance evaluation. This paper presents a comprehensive configurable mobility model MoBAN for evaluating intraand extra-WBAN communication. It implements different postures as well as individual node mobility within a particular posture. The model can be adapted to a broad range of applications for WBANs. The model is made available through http://www.es.ele.tue.nl/nes/, as an add-on to the mobility framework of the OMNeT++ simulator. Two case studies illustrate the use of the mobility model for performance evaluation of network protocols.

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Abstract-Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are developing into a promising solution for many applications, for example in healthcare. In many scenarios, there is some form of node mobility. The medium access control (MAC) mechanisms should support the expected kind of mobility in the network. Mobility is particularly complicating for contention free MAC protocols like TDMA-based protocols, because they dedicate unique slots to every node in a neighborhood. In scenarios such as body-area networking, some clusters of nodes move together, creating further challenges and opportunities. This paper proposes MCMAC (Mobile Cluster MAC), a TDMA-based MAC protocol to support mobile clusters in WSNs. The proposed protocol does not need adaptation time after movement of clusters. Several optimization mechanisms are proposed to decrease power consumption. Simulation results show that the optimizations decrease power consumption of nodes around 70% without increasing latency of data transmission compared to the non-optimized version.

Abstract-Cross-technology interference on the license-free ISM bands has a major negative effect on the performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Channel hopping has been adopted in the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode of IEEE 802.15.4e to eliminate blocking of wireless links caused by external interference on some frequency channels. This paper proposes an Enhanced version of the TSCH protocol (ETSCH) which restricts the used channels for hopping to the channels that are measured to be of good quality. The quality of channels is extracted using a new Non-Intrusive Channel-quality Estimation (NICE) technique by performing energy detections in selected idle periods every timeslot. NICE enables ETSCH to follow dynamic interference well, while it does not reduce throughput of the network. It also does not change the protocol, and does not require non-standard hardware. ETSCH uses a small Enhanced Beacon hopping Sequence List (EBSL) to broadcast periodic Enhanced Beacons (EB) in the network to synchronize nodes at the start of timeslots. Experimental results show that ETSCH improves reliability of network communication, compared to basic TSCH and a more advanced mechanism ATSCH. It provides higher packet reception ratios and reduces the maximum length of burst packet losses.