An energy-efficient node address naming scheme for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, the small data rate, generally 16 bits per packet, makes the overhead of globally unique network and MAC addresses, which is typically as much as the payload itself, undesirable (Elson, J. and Estrin, D. ICDCS\´01, 2001). We present a node address naming scheme that assigns locally unique addresses, which could be spatially reused, to nodes in an energy efficient manner; the scheme reduces the address size by a factor of 3.6. The focus of our work is solely on clustering routing approaches (Heinzelman, W., "Application-Specific Protocol Architectures for Wireless Networks", PhD thesis, MIT, 2000). Further, we question the need for separate MAC and network addresses and show how our spatially reused locally unique node address could be used in both contexts, leading to greater energy efficiency.