Enhanced tree routing for wireless sensor networks

Tree routing (TR) is a low-overhead routing protocol designated for simple, low-cost and low-power wireless sensor networks. It avoids flooding the network with path search and update messages in order to conserve bandwidth and energy by using only parent–child links for packet forwarding. The major drawback of TR is the increased hop-counts as compared with more sophisticated path search protocols. We propose an enhanced tree routing (ETR) strategy for sensor networks which have structured node address assignment schemes. In addition to the parent–child links, ETR also uses links to other one-hop neighbours if it is decided that this will lead to a shorter path. It is shown that such a decision can be made with minimum storage and computing cost by utilizing the address structure. Detailed algorithms for applying ETR to ZigBee networks are also presented. Simulation results reveal that ETR not only outperforms TR in terms of hop-counts, but also is more energy-efficient than TR.