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

In this work, we propose a scheme for the assignment of unique addresses to facilitate self-organization in a wireless sensor network. Wireless sensor networks, as a field, 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 nodes. The scheme is based on the concept of hierarchical levels and repeated patterns in order to achieve scalability. This work describes our scheme and the advantages of using it.