Title: ZigBee-based long-thin wireless sensor networks: address assignment and routing schemes

Authors: Meng-Shiuan Pan; Yu-Chee Tseng

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, 215 Taipei, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, 300 Hsin-Chu, Taiwan

Abstract: Although Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been extensively researched, its deployment is still a big concern. This paper makes two contributions to this issue. First, we promote a new concept of Long-Thin (LT) topology for WSNs, where a network may have a number of linear paths of nodes as backbones connecting to each other. These backbones are to extend the network to the intended coverage areas. At the first glance, a LT WSN only seems to be a special case of numerous WSN topologies. However, we observe, from real deployment experiences, that such a topology is quite general in many applications and deployments. The second contribution is that we show that the address assignment and thus the tree routing scheme defined in the original ZigBee specification may work poorly, if not fail, in a LT topology. We then propose simple, yet efficient, address assignment and routing schemes for a LT WSN. Simulation results are reported.

Keywords: address assignment; pervasive computing; tree routing; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; ZigBee; wireless networks; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2013.052412

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2013 Vol.12 No.3, pp.147 - 156

Received: 27 Aug 2011
Accepted: 28 Mar 2012

Published online: 02 Mar 2013 *

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