Shortcut Tree Routing in ZigBee Networks

ZigBee is the emerging industrial standard for ad hoc networks based on IEEE 802.15.4. Due to characteristics such as low data rate, low price, and low power consumption, ZigBee is expected to be used in wireless sensor networks for remote monitoring, home control, and industrial automation. Since one of the most important goals is to reduce the installation and running cost, ZigBee stack is embedded in small and cheap micro-controller units. Since tree routing does not require any routing tables to send the packet to the destination, it can be used in ZigBee end devices that have limited resources. However, tree routing has the problem that the packets follow the tree topology to the destination even if the destination is located nearby. We propose the shortcut tree routing protocol to reduce the routing cost of ZigBee tree routing by using the neighbor table that is originally defined in the ZigBee standard. While following the ZigBee tree routing algorithm, we suggest forwarding the packet to the neighbor node if it can reduce the routing cost to the destination. Simulation results show that the shortcut tree routing algorithm saves more than 30 percent of the hop count compared with ZigBee tree routing.