A two-tier dynamic addressing protocol for cluster-based wireless sensor networks

A new two-tier dynamic addressing (TTDA) protocol for cluster-based wireless sensor networks is proposed in this paper. The TTDA protocol adopts the two-tier address assignment, that is, the base station assigns addresses for the cluster heads and the cluster heads assign addresses for their cluster members. In order to reduce energy consumption, the Huffman coding is used by the base station when assigning addresses to cluster heads, so shorter addresses are allocated to cluster heads which are far from the base station. The address assignment is lease-based and would expire after a certain period of time, so the address could be reused if a node fails. In order to assign address to newly-deployed nodes, address reservation and real-time address assignment are also taken into account. TTDA has high flexibility to meet the needs of both the MAC protocol and network layer protocols. The mathematical analysis and experiment results show that the TTDA protocol outperforms the existing protocols in some key performance metrics, such as message overhead control, energy consumption in address transmission, and success ratio of address allocation.