An enhanced group mobility protocol for 6LoWPAN-based wireless body area networks

The IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) has attracted lots of attention recently because it can be used for the communications of Internet of things (IoT). In this paper, the concept of group-based network roaming in Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) domain is considered in the 6LoWPAN-based wireless body area networks. PMIPv6 is a standard to manage the network-based mobility in allIP wireless network. However, it does not perform well in group-based body area networks. To further reduce the handoff delay and signaling cost, an enhanced group mobility scheme is proposed in this paper to reduce the number of control messages, including Router Solicitation (RS) and Router Advertisement (RA) messages as opposed to the group-based PMIPv6 protocol. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed handoff scheme can reduce the handoff delay and signaling cost. The packet loss ratio and the overhead can also be reduced.