Address assignment for wireless sensor networks in mines

Monitoring of gas leaks and toxic substances in mines is made possible using wireless sensor networks. However, wireless networks in mines form linear topologies that are unusual in other types of networks. In this paper, we show that the ZigBee standard is not suitable to mines because of the addressing mechanisms it proposes. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we show that the distributed address assignment mechanism induces a strong limitation on the depth of the network. Second, we show that the stochastic address assignment mechanism induces address conflicts that are costly to resolve. Third, we propose a new mechanism where nodes are able to request unused addresses. We show that our new mechanism is able to cope with large linear topologies such as those existing in mines.