Automatic discovery of topologies and addressing for Linear wireless sensors networks

Wireless sensor networks are a collection of sensor nodes that collaborate to sense a specific event in a given environment. When sensors monitor a structure organized linearly (e.g., pipelines, rivers, railways), they are organized in Linear WSN (LWSN, constituted by connected portions of lines), with different properties than a uniformly deployed WSN. The distributed address allocation in the ZigBee cluster-tree suffers from limitations in LWSN: the number of children is limited, as well as the maximum number of children routers, and the maximum tree depth. Stochastic address assignment, also available in ZigBee, has a high cost in exchanged messages and requires an expensive (in terms of messages and memory) routing process. This paper proposes an automatic discovery of topologies for linear wireless sensor networks combined with an efficient addressing mechanism. We show that our proposition avoids the waste of addresses while keeping the number of messages exchanged proportional to the number of nodes in the network.