Segmentation-Based On-Demand Scalable Address Assignment for ZigBee Networks

To address the orphan problem caused by the limitation on the number of child nodes of a router in ZigBee networks, we propose an on-demand scalable address assignment algorithm based on segmentation of address spaces. Through segmenting the 16-bit address space of ZigBee networks according to the maximum address predefined by the distributed address assignment mechanism (DAAM), our algorithm enables a router to use the addresses in new space segments if it has no sufficient addresses to accommodate child nodes. In addition, we improve the tree routing protocol (TR) to adapt to extended addresses. Performance analysis and numerical results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms DAAM and one of its improvements in terms of the success rate of address assignment, communication overhead, and the average time spent to assign an address.