Hierarchical Numbering Based Addressing and Stateless Routing Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to energy and other relevant constraints, addressing of nodes and data routing techniques in sensor networks differ significantly from other networks. In this article, we present an energy-efficient addressing and stateless routing paradigm for wireless sensor networks. We propose a dynamic and globally unique address allocation scheme for sensors in such a way that these addresses can later be used for data routing. We build a tree like organization of sensors rooted by the sink node based on their transmission adjacency and then set labels on each sensor with a number according to the preorder traversal of the tree from the root. In this addressing process, each sensor keeps necessary information so that they can later route data packets to the destination depending on these addresses, without keeping the large routing table and running any no route discovery phase. Moreover, the scheme does not use location information as well (as done by geo-routing) and can be used in the indoor environment. We conduct simulations to measure the soundness of our approach and make a comparison with another similar technique TreeCast. Simulation results reveal that our approach performs better than its counterpart in several important performance metrics like address length and communication energy.