Experiments on mobile sink application in ZigBee networks

Abstract

Many sensor network applications have been developed for smart home, disaster management, and a wide range of other applications since the ZigBee standard was released. These applications, however, generally assume a static base station as well as static sensor nodes. For mobile sink applications, there are many challenges that need to be taken into consideration, such as the difficulty in detecting link failure, unstable network connectivity, and unreachable destinations, even though the new ZigBee standard (2007 version) supports device portability. In this paper, we analyze the problems of a mobile sink application, and propose a new application framework that supports seamless data communication when using a mobile sink in ZigBee networks. We evaluate the performance of the suggested application framework in terms of data reception rate and network connectivity of the mobile sink in experiments evaluating various rejoin conditions of the mobile sink.