Light-Weight Addressing and Routing Schemes for Resource-Constrained WPAN Devices

Traditional heavyweight routing algorithms are not suitable for resource constrained IEEE 802.15.4 [15] complaint devices. Although, ZigBee [21] provided an addressing scheme and a table-free Tree routing algorithm for such devices, it has several limitations [6, 7, 8, 9].

In this paper, we have proposed a flexible, variable-length addressing scheme together with a new lightweight, table-free routing algorithm. The addressing scheme leverages the properties of prefix code and allows devices to have arbitrary number of children and does not also limit network depth. The routing algorithm uses simple mathematical and/or logical calculations to take routing decisions. Simulation and analytical results show that this flexible mechanism exhibits very low overhead and can be used for virtually all types of network topologies.