Future Generation Computer Systems 88 (2018) 309–318 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Future Generation Computer Systems journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fgcs CoAP-based group mobility management protocol for the Internet-of-Things in WBAN environment Moneeb Gohar a, *, Jin-Ghoo Choi b , Seok-Joo Koh c a Department of Computer Science, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan b Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Yeungnam University, Republic of Korea c School of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Republic of Korea highlights • To support mobility management in web based Internet-of-Things environment is critical issue. • A CoAP-based mobility management protocol, named CoMP has been proposed, but this protocol was designed for a single sensor node mobility. • To overcome this limitation, this paper propose a CoAP-based group mobility management protocol, named CoMP-G in which one of the body sensor will function as a coordinator and it will exchange all the control messages with web-of-things mobility management system (WMMS) on behalf of other body sensors. article info Article history: Received 31 October 2017 Received in revised form 4 May 2018 Accepted 2 June 2018 Available online 6 June 2018 Keywords: CoAP Mobility management Web-based IoT mobility WBAN Group mobility abstract The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) has been widely used, as the number of embedded sensors or devices increases. To support mobility management in web based Internet-of-Things environment is critical issue. For this purpose, a CoAP-based mobility management protocol, named CoMP has been proposed, but this protocol was designed for a single sensor node mobility. However, it does not perform well in group-based mobility. To overcome this limitation, we propose a CoAP-based group mobility management protocol, named CoMP-G. In the proposed scheme, one of the body sensor will function as a coordinator and it will exchange all the control messages with web-of-things mobility management system (WMMS) on behalf of other body sensors. Besides, each WMMS maintains the information of the group of body sensors. From the numerical analysis, we proved that the proposed scheme gives the best performance in terms of total signaling and handover delay from the existing CoMP protocol. © 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V. 1. Introduction Wireless Networks are the biggest components of network industry where computer networking is done using wireless con- nections by connecting network nodes [1]. With passing days’ different devices like mobile phones are now become the basic needs. So there is a need of Internet Protocol which are especially designed for the mobile devices when they move from one net- work to another. Nowadays, we are not limited to one network devices, such as the communication becomes Machine to Machine, Human to Machine and Machine to Human and Human to Human, this major penetration introduced the idea of Internet of Things (IoT) [2–5]. IoT serves in many fields like Medical sciences, elec- tronic engineering as well as mechanical engineering. IoT play a * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: moneebgohar@gmail.com (M. Gohar), sjkoh@knu.ac.kr (S. Koh). major role in the field of health care [6–8]. Intelligent medical small sensors can be worn on or implanted in the human body. These sensors measured the data and send it to external medical doctor. With these sensors the patient can move from place to another. Many people die from different fatal diseases, when it is diagnosed lately. For this purpose, the Wireless Body Area Network is used to detect early and prevent from the fatal diseases [8–10]. A wireless body area network are the specific types of sensor network which are designed to handle multiple medical sensors placed inside or outside of the body. The generalized model of WBAN is shown in Fig. 1. These days, each person has multiple devices that can commu- nicate each other. The communication pattern can be machine-to- machine, human-to-machine, machine-to-human, and human-to- human. Anything we think of can exchange information to serve human beings. It is the concept of IoT [11]. IoT has found many applications in various fields such as medical science, electronic engineering as well as mechanical engineering [12]. Suppose we https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.06.003 0167-739X/© 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.