Distributed address assignment with address borrowing for ZigBee networks

ZigBee is a popular communication standard for wireless sensor networks. It suggests a distributed address assignment mechanism (DAAM), which is easy to implement but may restrict the number of children of a router and the depth of the network. Since DAAM is too conservative, the utilization of the 16-bit address pool may become poor, causing the orphan problem. In this paper, we propose a distributed address assignment scheme by allowing a parent to borrow a subtree of address space from a neighbor to alleviate the orphan problem. When a new node tries to associate with a parent router which has no free address, this parent router will inquire its 2-hop neighbors for lending a subtree of free address space. We also propose a light-weight routing to support one-to-one routing in this environment.