A different approach of addressing, energy efficient routing and data aggregation for enhanced tree routing protocol

Abstract

Tree topology based sensor node deployment in a region is a common approach. The network has a root called sink node and leaves known as end-devices. The end-devices sense the environmental phenomenon and forward it to the sink by single-hopping or multi-hopping. For it, device can either follow a fixed parent-child path depicted by Tree Routing protocols, or can utilize neighbor table to identify shortest path to the destination. The Enhanced Tree Routing (ETR) protocol is such a protocol that uses a structured node address assignment scheme. It uses neighbor table to find alternative one-hop neighbors link with minimum computation, other than parent-child links, for packet forwarding. The protocol is well suited for small and static tree topology and performs well. However, it lacks in focusing some issues like, how data is forwarded to sink i.e. raw-data converge cast or aggregated-data converge cast at each node, how to resolve multiple shortest path problem if network density increases and how to deal with changeable network topology. We, in this paper thus resolve some of the issues related to ETR protocol by proposing some new ideas and improvements. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.