A Path-Connected-Cluster Wireless Sensor Network and Its Formation, Addressing, and Routing Protocols

Although wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been extensively researched, their deployment is still a main concern. We observe that many monitoring applications for WSNs have adopted a path-connected-cluster (PCC) topology, where regions to be monitored are deployed with clusters of sensor nodes. Since these clusters might be physically separated, paths of sensor nodes are used to connect them together. We call such networks PCC-WSNs. PCC-WSNs may be widely applied in real situations, such as bridge-connected islands, street-connected buildings, and pipe-connected ponds. In this paper, we show that the address assignment scheme defined by ZigBee will perform poorly in terms of address utilization. We then propose a systematical solution, which includes network formation, automatic address assignment, and light-weight routing. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution.