Energy-Efficient Shortcut Tree Routing in ZigBee Networks

ZigBee is an industrial standard for low rate and low power wireless personal area networks. It is based on IEEE 802.15.4 physical and MAC layers. ZigBee defines the network layer to support multi-hop communication and routing between nodes. In ZigBee, tree routing is the simplest routing protocol with low-overhead in which parent-child links will be used for data transfer. In spite of this fact, tree routing has two major problems; first problem is its more hop-counts as compared to the sophisticated path search protocols and another one is the hotspot problem. In this paper, we propose a new tree-based routing algorithm is named ESTR (Energy-Efficient Shortcut Tree Routing) to decrease hop-counts and to balance energy in the network by using the information contained in neighbour tables. ESTR suggests an optimized low-delay route based on the load balancing over nodes. The results of simulations show that ESTR significantly improves the network lifetime, end-to-end delay and reliability as compared to the standard tree routing.