A scheme for the assignment of unique addresses to support self-organization in wireless sensor networks

We propose a scheme for the assignment of unique addresses to facilitate self-organization in a wireless sensor network. The field of wireless sensor networks has experienced tremendous growth in the last few years, and their usage is rapidly increasing; however there still remain several issues that hinder the usability of such networks. One such issue is self-organization, where the nodes form a network by collaboration with each other without using manual intervention and using little external help. We propose a scheme to facilitate sensor nodes to organize themselves into a network. Our scheme uses unique addresses and requires only (3N-2) messages to assign addresses to all N nodes. The scheme is based on the concept of hierarchical levels and repeated patterns in order to achieve scalability. The paper describes our scheme and the advantages of using it.