Distributed Scalable Network Association in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) need to employ a network association mechanism that can securely allocate a unique address to each node while minimizing energy consumption. However, conventional centralized and broadcasting based network association mechanisms may consume large energy, and distributed network association mechanisms may suffer from addressing failure when applied to large scale WSNs. In this paper, we consider distributed network association with scalability for the construction of a large scale WSN. The proposed mechanism constructs a large scale addressing tree before network initialization. Based on the addressing tree, it allows each router to have its own addressing space which will be used for unique addressing of its child nodes. Then, a novel parent/child selection algorithm can assign routers to be located throughout the whole deployment area. Thus, nodes can join the network in the presence of sufficient neighbor routers and receive a unique address in a distributed manner. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by computer simulation, showing remarkable performance improvement over conventional schemes when applied to a large scale WSN.