A dynamic and distributed addressing and routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have traditionally had static topologies that require little or no maintenance from their addressing mechanisms. New research directions have introduced additional scenarios where WSNs should adapt to the environment and network conditions. This shift in requirements also means that the addressing schemes should evolve dynamically, providing a distributed and lightweight way of assigning addresses to the sensor nodes. In addition, the routing protocols, which drive the information exchange within the network, must leverage the addressing properties in order to function efficiently. In this paper, we present Sequence Chain (SC) as a lightweight tree-based addressing mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks. SC offers distributed and dynamic address allocation together with optimized tree routing. We compare our work with the de-facto industry standard, ZigBee, and show how SC improves the formation of addressing trees and yields up to three and a half times shorter multi-hop routes. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.