Z-Cast: A Multicast Routing Mechanism in ZigBee Cluster-Tree Wireless Sensor Networks

Group communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) requires an efficient multicast routing mechanism due to inherent resources and computing constraints of sensor nodes. ZigBee, which is a standard protocol that represents a very prominent technology for WSNs, does not consider multicast routing in its specification. In this paper, a group is defined as a set of nodes that share the same sensory information. The main contributions of this paper are two-folded: First, we propose Z-Cast, an efficient multicast routing mechanism for groups that share the same sensory information in a cluster-tree WSN. Second, we show how to integrate the Z-Cast mechanism in open-ZB which is an open source IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee implementation. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency and backward compatibility of our proposal with the standard specification.