Intra-mobility handover enhancement in healthcare wireless sensor networks

Health monitoring of patients is a common task in healthcare houses from nursing homes to hospitals. Medical staff moves close to patients and collects their monitoring body parameters. To help the overall state control of monitored patients, it could be performed in autonomous, real-time, and remotely way. The application of healthcare wireless sensor networks to these scenarios could perform this job. Through a network it is possible to reach each one of the patients´ nodes anytime anywhere as long as a network terminal is accessible. Considering this scenario, the paper proposes a solution to deal with mobile nodes in healthcare wireless sensor networks. The proposed solution is based on a handover procedure that guarantees continuous accessibility to the mobile nodes while moving through different access points´ coverage range within the same network (intra-mobility). The most recent mobility approaches although supporting handover solutions, they are not compatible with continuous access to the nodes of a WSN. This proposal uses a distributed method to evaluate and initiate the handover process. Therefore, the procedure could be performed either by the nodes or by the access points. To validate this solution it is presented a laboratory prototype and two evaluation tools.