A route discovery method based on limited flooding in ZigBee networks

ZigBee is an emerging standard for the low cost, low power and low rate wireless networks. ZigBee standard specifies two routing protocols: a tree routing protocol and a route discovery protocol similar to AODV. The second one discovers the optimal path by flooding route quest command frame, which wastes significant amount of bandwidth and energy. This paper proposes a novel route discovery method based on limited flooding in ZigBee networks. The tree routing information is utilized to obtain the flooding radius, which limites the flooding in a bounded region of the network. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively reduce the communication overhead.