A hand-off mechanism of mobile nodes in a location positioning system based on ZigBee tags

Location awareness is one of the key functions to build an U-city. Recently, many of works for the location-aware systems are emerging to be applied to on-going large-scale apartment complex. For example, when dwellers or cars with active tags are move in the apartment complex, the active tags broadcast their own identifiers periodically and receivers such that routers use this information to calculate the location of the active tags. Since the active tags can actually move between routers and coordinators, it requires a hand-off mechanism. In this paper, we investigate the hand-off problem occurred in location awareness system based on ZigBee active tags. We propose and analyze a new approach for handling the hand-off problem. Through a mathematical analysis, we show that our approach diminishes the quantity of packet transfer than ZigBee's approach.