Variable length dynamic addressing based on network traffic distribution in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, a novel dynamic addressing scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed by using variable length coding. A WSN is typically composed of numerous tiny energy-constrained sensor nodes with limited information processing and data storage capabilities; thus, the energy-efficient strategy is the key issue in designing protocols for WSN. Traditional addressing strategies adopt flat addressing (static and uniform addresses) for sensor nodes. However, the proposed variable length dynamic addressing (VLDA) for sensor nodes is based on the fact that different nodes in the network have uneven traffic loads. Therefore, nodes with more data to receive or send are allocated with shorter addresses. Whether a node is busy or not is determined by the network traffic distribution (NTD), which is defined as the number of data packets each node has received or sent in a period of time. Sensor nodes’ energy is saved by VLDA scheme; hence, the wireless sensor network’s lifetime is extended. In the simulation, a 20% improvement has been achieved through the addressing scheme compared to traditional flat addressing.

Keywords

variable length dynamic addressing (VLDA) / wireless sensor network (WSN) / energy saving / network traffic distribution (NTD)