Design and Development of an Energy-Efficient Node Address

Assignment Algorithm for Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

1. Introduction:
Tremendous advancement in the field of wireless communication, microelectronics and IC
fabrication have led the development of tiny sensors with sensing, computation and
communication capabilities. These sensor nodes deployed densely close to the physical
environment, organized into a network (WSN) collaboratively perform some distributive task.
These sensor nodes can sense, measure and gather information from environment (temperature,
pressure or humidity etc.) and transmit the sensed data to the sink (or user) where the specific
application resides[1][2][3]. Sensor nodes are devices contains the four main components
showing in figure 1 that includes:

 A sensing (one or more sensor) and actuation unit.

 A processing unit (limited computing capability compared to traditional computer)
 A communication unit(short range)
 A power unit (battery)

Figure1: Typical sensor node

A wide variety of applications of WSN are possible. These may be categorized as event
detection, tracking and monitoring. Usually WSN have been used in high-end application such as
radiation and nuclear-threat detection systems, weapon sensors for ship, biomedical application,
habitat sensing and seismic monitoring. In recent times, sensor networks are used in networked
biological and chemical sensors for national security application [1]. Furthermore, it can be
applicable to direct consumer application. Existing and potentials applications of sensor networks
include, among others, military sensing, physical security, air traffic control. traffic surveillance,

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video surveillance, industrial and manufacturing automation, distributed robotics, weather
sensing, environment monitoring, national border monitoring, building and structure monitoring,
vehicle tracing and detection, tracking and monitoring doctors and patients inside a hospital,
elderly assistance, automated meter reading, precision agriculture, forest fire detection etc.

Example of a typical wireless sensor network is shown in following figure 2:

Figure 2: Typical Wireless sensor network

Individual sensors can do very little of their task but large number of sensors can be harmonized
into a planned network to carry out a big sensing task. Sensors are mainly battery-powered, and
when deployed they remain in the subject area unattended for long time. Battery can hardly be re-
energized or replaced in case of power drain-out. So sensors are instinctively constrained by
energy. They do not transmit signal to a very long distance to reach a remote sink, rather they
form a multi hop communication scenario with their short range radio equipments to conserve
energy and transmitting data each time to the immediate neighbors and thus fusing it into the
entire network.

Node Address assignment ensure the identity of a sensor node in the network so that sensors
communicate with its sink and vice versa. In fact, most of the routing protocols need a network
wide unique sensor node address in order to exchange data among sensor nodes. Node addresses
are also required for some administrative task such as configuring and monitoring of individual
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nodes, downloading binary code to sensor nodes etc. But, Due to energy constraint and particular
data reporting manners of sensor nodes, address assignment problem for sensor network is
notably different from that of for traditional network. For example, the Berkeley Motes have a
default fixed packet size of 36 bytes. Suppose the MAC address of 48 bits is applied and packets
carry only the source and destination node IDs in their header. It results in an effective payload
of, at most, (36 -12) =24 bytes which is less than 70% of packets size [12]. In IEEE 802.15.4, the
frame length is limited to 127 byte due to its low bit rate [14]. 32 bits (4 bytes) IPv4 or 128 bits
(16bytes) IPv6 addresses are impractical because they have 20 bytes and 40 bytes of overhead
respectively.
Moreover, sensor nodes are deployed randomly in remote and mainly unattended. So, fault
tolerance and scalability is very important for node address assignment. Here, Fault tolerance is
the correct address assignment even though various fault such as duplicate assignment of the
same address, assigning multiple addresses to the same node or address loss happen. Scalability
refers to the ability to adapt the address assignment in case of topology change or a number of
nodes added in the network.

The rest of the proposal is organized as follows: In Sec. 2, brief reviews of the existing node
address assignment techniques used in wireless sensor networks are discussed. In section 3, open
issues are highlighted. Then, in section 4-8, sequentially describes the problem statement and
significance, scope, objectives of the research, methodology used in this research and expected
outcome of the research.

2. Related Works:
The main task of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes are to sense and collect data from a
target domain, process the data and transmit the information back to the specific sites where the
underlying application resides. Thus the communication paradigm is mainly many- to-one that is
source node to sink node. There is infrequent need to communicate between two distant nodes.
Moreover, since the payload length in the data packet is usually small, it wastes bandwidth and
power if the data are encapsulated in a TCP/UDP/IP packet. Thus, customized network protocols
are adopted instead of TCP/IP to save the communication overhead and energy consumption.

There are several mechanism proposed for node addressing problem. Dynamic host configuration
protocol (DHCP) [4] commonly used for automatically address assignment to internet host.
However this is a state full approach and suffers from heavy control overhead which is not fit for
wireless sensor network.

Muneeb Ali et al [5], proposed a cluster based locally unique address assignment scheme for
sensor networks. Nodes are grouped into some disjoint clusters and nodes in the same cluster are

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given local addresses that are unique within the cluster. Address reuse is possible among different
clusters. Each cluster is assigned a unique address, and clusters are arranged logically in some
hierarchy. When nodes communicate within a cluster, they use their local addresses, but when
they communicate amongst clusters, cluster ID is appended with the local addresses. If all cluster
IDs along with the local address are combined together for a node, a network wide unique
address of that node is generated.
However this scheme assumes that cluster formation process is completed at network boot time
and those clusters are conserved. This is not applicable when the cluster is changed dynamically
like the protocol LEACH [6].

Pal Chaudhuri et al. in [7] proposed a global unique method of address allocation named
TreeCast. In this technique, nodes are organized in a tree structure. Sink node is the root of the
tree. The parent address and a random address combine to a child’s address, and the parent
address is a prefix address. Figure 3 shows an example of node address assignment by using
TreeCast.

Figure 3: Address allocation by TreeCast.

However, its addressing scheme is only optimized for a single sink node. To support multiple
sink nodes, the algorithm requires multiple addresses per node, each of which is originated from
individual sink node.

Uddin et. al in [8] proposed another global addressing technique for wireless adhoc network
based on hierarchical numbering. This technique is similar to TreeCast but utilizing the address
bit more efficiently. In TreeCast, the address size is increasing as depth of the tree increases.
Unlike this, here first tree is constructed then a post order traversal of the tree is made from sink.

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And a unique number is assigned in each node. Sink initiate the traversal, so it get the highest
number. It can be shown that , for network size N, log 2 [N] bit is enough for assigning unique
address to each node. Figure 4, shows an example of hierarchical numbering.
However, if the network topology changes, the algorithm need to execute again and the entire
node address will be changed.

Figure 4: Address allocation by Hierarchical numbering.

The ZigBee[9] standard adopts a fully decentralize addressing scheme called DAAM
(Distributed address assignment mechanism) which employs an algorithm C-skip (child skip)
where addresses are assigned with a parent-child relationship that forms a symmetrical tree.16
bits are used as a node address. In this mechanism, the router or coordinator should have priory
knowledge about the maximum number of children that a parent node can have (C m), the
maximum depth of the network (Lm) and the maximum number of child routers of a parent node
(Rm). C-skip(d) is an offset that a parent node distributes address to child node. The calculation
of C-skip(d) is :

C-skip(d) = 1+ Cm × (Lm − d − 1), if Rm = 1

(1+Cm−Rm−Cm×RmLm−d−1 ) --------------------- (1)

-------------------------------------- ,otherwise.
(1 – Rm )

Where d is the network depth.

The child node address is assigned by the following equation:

An = Aparent + Cskip(d) × Rm + n, 1 ≤ n ≤ Cm, ------------------------------------------- (2)
And child router address is assigned by:
An = A parent + (n-1) * Cskip(d) + 1 ; --------------------------------------------(3)

An example of ZigBee address assignment is shown in figure 5 where Cm =4, Rm = 4 and Lm =3:

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 Figure 5: An address assignment example is ZigBee network.

The address assignment in ZigBee is very efficient due to its fully distributive nature which
imposes a very low overhead cost. However it is inflexible because it is static. Moreover, it
suffers from some problem like address wasting, room shortage, and route detour [10]. If a node
already used up its address segment, it cannot accept any new node to join though a chunk of free
address is available to other nodes. In addition, C-skip scales only up to depth 5.

In [11] a token based scheme is proposed where a special node is assigned to a token holder,
which takes in charge of address allocation to new node. However, every node in the networks
should keep track of the latest address of the holder.

Jialiu Lin et al in [12] proposed a variable length field-wide unique ID scheme where first
construct a overlay binary tree and each position of tree was mapped to a unique ID and assigned
to a node. However it does not minimize the control overhead.
Jun Zhan et al in [13] also proposed a variable length dynamic addressing (VLDA) based on
network traffic distribution. VLDA assigns shorter address to busy node and longer address to
idle nodes and thus obtain the energy efficiency.
However, if the traffic pattern altered or network topology changed frequently, these methods
suffer from heavy control overhead.

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3. Open Issues:
Node address assignment in wireless sensor networks has attracted a lot to the researchers in the
recent years and introduced unique challenge compared to mobile ad hoc network and traditional
wired network due to its specialized characteristics like energy constrain and data communication
paradigm .Many important issues need to be examined regarding address assignment such as
address space length, fixed or variable, storage cost of allocation table, locally unique addresses
or globally unique addresses, address reusing, network partition and merge supporting, and
security consideration.

The most important research issue is that develop an energy efficient , scalable, self organized
and fault tolerant node address assignment algorithm for large scale wireless sensor network.

In addition, there is a need to develop QoS aware addressing algorithm which can ensure
guaranteed delay for real time applications. Currently, there is very little research that looks at
handling QoS requirements in a very energy constrained environment like WSNs.

Moreover, sometimes a sensor node needs to communicate with the outside network like internet.
So a node addressing technique that Integrate Wireless Sensor Network with Internet also an
interesting area to explore.

Addressing mechanisms are susceptible to a number of attacks. Ensuring network integrity,

mitigating DoS attacks, “Man-in-the-middle” attacks is also an important research issue for node
address assignment in wireless sensor network.

4. Problem Statement and Significance:

Wireless sensor networks have been gaining increasing demand in many sectors all over the
world. However, there is a growing concern when the size of the network becomes large because
IP-based addressing techniques are impractical and too costly due to its large packet overhead. A
number of researchers have proposed solutions to the problem of energy-efficient node address
assignment for large scale networks. This problem is multidimensional in the sense that a hybrid
of multiple addressing techniques must be used in order to effectively solve the problem. Thus,
the need for developing a novel energy-efficient node addressing scheme for large scale wireless
sensor networks that incorporates multiple feature of addressing techniques.

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5. Scope:
This research will focus on only node address assignment in network layer and assumed full
support will get from the other layers. In this research we will study different node address
assignment algorithm or techniques used in wireless sensor network to identify opportunity for
further enhancements, design an enhanced energy efficient, scalable and fault tolerant address
assignment algorithm and evaluate the performance of the strategy. Also security mechanism of
wireless sensor network will not consider in this specific research.

6. Research Objectives:
The major objective of this research is to develop an energy efficient node address assignment:

 To identify limitations of existing node address assignment algorithms or techniques used

in wireless sensor network.
 To develop energy efficient node address assignment algorithm that will be suitable for
large scale Wireless sensor network.
 To reduce the packet and control overhead.
 And Comparative performance evolution of this proposed algorithm.

The major objective of this research is to develop an energy efficient node address assignment
techniques that will suitable for large scale wireless sensor network. These are the sub objectives:

 To develop an efficient scheme that will be reduce the packet and control overhead in the
network.
 To analyze the performance of the proposed techniques and benchmark with the standard
method.

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7. Research Methodology:

Literature review on Wireless sensor network, its

application and opportunity.

Study existing node address assignment algorithm used

in wireless sensor network.

Identify the limitation of existing node address

assignment algorithm.

Develop a new energy efficient node address

assignment algorithm which overcomes the limitation
of the existing techniques.

Simulation and performance evaluation of the proposed

address assignment algorithm.
Tools: NS2

8. Expected Outcomes:
 An energy efficient scalable and fault tolerant node address assignment algorithm for
large scale wireless sensor network.
 Journal paper and conference paper.
 Master’s thesis

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9. Research Milestone:
Project Activities Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Ma Apr May Jun
10 10 10 10 10 11 11 11 11 11 11

Literature review on WSN,

its application and
opportunity.
Study on existing Node
address assignment
techniques
Comparative analysis of
these algorithm
Develop a new algorithm to
meet the research objectives
Implementation and
simulation
Analyzing the simulation
result and benchmarking
Documentation and report
writing

10. References:
[1] Kazem Shohraby, Daniel Minoli, Taieb Znati, Wireless Sensor Networks, technology,
Protocol and Applications, John Wiley & Sons,2007

[2] R.Verdone, Dardari, Mazzini, A.Conti, Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks; Elsevier:
London, UK, 2008.

[3] Ameer Ahmed Abbasi, Mohamed Younis, A survey on clustering algorithms for wireless
sensor networks, Computer Communications 30 (2007)2826–2841.

[4] R. Droms. "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol", RFC: 2131, (March 1997).

[5] M. Ali and Z. A. Uzmi, "An Energy-Efficient Node Address Naming Scheme for Wireless
Sensor Networks", IEEE International Networking and Communication Conference INCC'04,
2004.

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[6] W.Heinzelman. Application-Specific Protocol Architectures for Wire-less Networks. Ph.D.
thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,2000.

[7] S. P. Chaudhuri, S. Du, A. K. Saha, and D. B. Johnson, "TreeCast: a stateless addressing and
routing architecture for sensor networks," in Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium,
2004. Proceedings. 18th International, 2004, p. 221.

[8] Md. Yusuf Sarwar Uddin, Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman and Md.Mostofa Akbar,
"Hierarchical Numbering Based Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad hoc Networks", Proc. of 1st
International Conference on Next Generation Wireless Systems 2006 (ICNEWS06), Dhaka, pp.
345-349, January 2006.

[9] ZigBee 2006, ZigBee Alliance. http://www.zigbee.org

[10] Li-Hsing Yen ,Wei-Ting Tsai, The room shortage problem of tree-based
ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4 wireless networks, Computer Communications
Volume 33, Issue 4, 1 March 2010, Pages 454-462.

[11]S.Kim, J.Lee, and I.Yeom, “A token-based dynamic address allocation protocol for mobile
adhoc networks,” Tech. Rep., Computer Science, KAIST, Seoul, Korea, 2005.

[12] Jialiu Lin,   Yunhuai Liu ,  Lionel M.Ni,SIDA: Self-organized ID Assignment in Wireless
Sensor Networks, IEEE international conference on Mobile adhoc and Sensor system(MASS),
2007

[13] Jun ZHAN, Bo YANG, Aidong MEN, Variable length dynamic addressing based on
network traffic distribution in wireless sensor networks, Front. Electr. Electron.Eng. China 2010,
5(1):43–48.

[14] RFC 4944, Transmission of IPv6 packets over IEEE 802.15.4 Networks,
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4944

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