Hardware ID auto-assigning mechanism for embedded wireless network

Unique hardware Identifiers (ID), such as media access control (MAC) addresses, are needed to be pre-assigned in prevailing network protocols as a distinctive information source. No prevailing mechanism supports the auto-assignment of these IDs and thus these IDs need global management to guarantee their uniqueness. This paper proposes a new mechanism which makes use of working frequency errors of the microcontroller units (MCU) as the distinctive information to create unique IDs for different nodes. By accumulating and amplifying the working frequency errors of different embedded nodes, this mechanism could enable different wireless nodes to generate unique IDs. Hardware experiments show that this new mechanism could work well in auto-assigning hardware IDs to a small scale of common lowcost embedded wireless equipments.