An Effective Broadcast Strategy for Route Discovery in the ZigBee Network

The route discovery in ZigBee is performed by simple flooding where every node forwards the packet once. The uncontrolled flooding usually is likely to serious contention and collision due to many redundant transmissions. It therefore can lead to decreasing network performances such as routing overhead and packet delivery ratio. To cope with this, this paper proposes an effective broadcast algorithm called ZBARD (ZigBee broadcasting algorithm on route discovery). As ZBARD sets the broadcast radius to a proper value which can guarantee establishing a shortest path between nodes, it minimizes control packets issued by the route discovery. Due to limitation of redundant transmissions, it reduces collision as well as contention and results in improving network performances such as routing overhead and packet delivery ratio. Simulation shows that the proposed algorithm reduces the number of unnecessary transmissions followed by route discoveries well.