Enhancement and performance evaluation of a multicast routing mechanism in ZigBee cluster-tree Wireless Sensor networks

Routing is a challenging issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to their inherent memory and energy constraints. Multicast Routing is used when dealing with group communication and it is well used in WSNs because it improves efficiency and reduces path length in the network. ZigBee is a standard protocol that presents a very prominent technology for WSNs. Z-Cast is a multicast mechanism that has been proposed for ZigBee cluster-tree WSNs. However, this mechanism was not tested on a real WSN platform and presents some gaps related to its memory and communication. In addition, the performance of this mechanism has not been evaluated. In this paper, we address these problems and present an amelioration of this protocol. In addition, we integrate this mechanism in Open-ZB toolset as this implementation does not consider multicast routing in its specification. The main contributions of this paper are two folded: first, we propose an amelioration of Z-Cast that may improve its efficiency and reduce its memory cost. Second, we integrate this protocol in Open-ZB and evaluate its performance on telosB motes.