Priority based ZigBee routing protocol for LR-WPAN

ZigBee is a networking standard for low power, low data-rate, resource constrained networks. It provides network and upper layer services for LR-WPAN, cyber physical systems, industrial sensor networks, smart grids, home automations, etc. The routing layer uses the tree based routing protocol wherein only parent-child relationship are considered for routing, ignoring neighbor nodes. This results in packets being routed through several hops towards the destination even if it is within senders 1-hop transmission range, via highly loaded or high traffic links. The paper proposes an improved ZigBee algorithm by employing neighbor tables and link quality indicator (LQI). Keeping in mind the low complexity of traditional ZigBee protocol, priority based approach has been implemented by using two reserved bits as priority bits in route selection. Opnet Simulator is used for the simulation purpose along with Visual Studio 2005 for C++ compiler. From the simulation results it can be observed that the proposed priority based routing protocol performs better than the classical ZigBee tree algorithm, and thus can be claimed as an enhanced ZigBee protocol.