Abstract:

The latest advances in wireless networking technologies and the growing popularity of these technologies have opened the door for exciting new applications. The deployment of such systems has attracted a wide variety of potential areas that were not feasible before. These areas include home and industrial automation, environment monitoring and sensing, security and surveillance, human and goods tracking, medical monitoring, and applications in defense relating scenarios. Obviously, the wireless systems are supposed to be robust, flexible, reliable, and secure ones.

Each node in a wireless network can communicate with nodes in its immediate neighborhood (that is within its transmission range). Obviously, each node must have a unique identity, called its network address, to facilitate peer-to-peer communication among the nodes. Due to the ad hoc, irregular, and spontaneous nature of the network topology, the address assignment becomes a non-trivial issue that needs to be addressed carefully. Several approaches for address assignment to the nodes in a wireless network have been reported. But most of these schemes suffer from one failure or the other to fully address the issue.

Here we propose a new address assignment scheme for wireless networks that may equally be applicable to wireless ad hoc networks, wireless sensors networks, wireless mesh network, and any other kind of wireless multi-hop networks. This scheme treats the address space as a regular shaped structure, i.e. an n-dimensional hyper-cube, which allows nodes to assign addresses to their child nodes in a systematic manner. In some addressing schemes such as one used by ZigBee, there is a restriction on the maximum number of levels that the addressing tree can have in the network. Our scheme removes such a restriction. Moreover, it brings in robustness against network partitioning when a few nodes fail. This is an improvement over ZigBee protocol, where failure of a single node partitions the underlying network tree.