Location-Based IP Addressing in IP-Enable Wireless Sensor Networks

Network addressing is a traditional problem in communications network. IP addressing which can fully reflect the characteristics of Wireless Sensor Network will provide good support for the design of network routing and management protocols. The location information which is important in most of WSN application can be used to simplify routing policy, and is also supported by IPv6. In this paper, we propose a location-based IP addressing protocol. We assume that nodes in Wireless Sensor Network know their current physical location; thus, this location information can be exploited to facilitate the generation of Location-based IP address. This paper describes Location-based IP addressing architecture for WSNs multicast and unicast within a local or metropolitan environment using two-dimensional address structures and analyzes the implementation in 6LoWPAN.