Improvement of Hierarchical Routing in ZigBee Networks

지그비 계층적 라우팅의 성능 향상 기법

ZigBee is the emerging industrial standard for ad hoc networks based on IEEE 802.15.4. It is used for low data rate and low power wireless network applications. Expected applications of ZigBee include wireless sensor networks for remote monitoring, home control, and industrial automation. Since one of the most important design goals of ZigBee is to reduce the installation and running costs, the ZigBee stack is embedded in the cheap and small micro-controller unit. The hierarchical routing algorithm is used for ZigBee end devices which have very limited resources. Using the block addressing scheme, end devices can send data to the destination without a routing table. However, hierarchical routing has the problem that the packets follow the tree hierarchy to the destination even if the destination is located nearby. In this paper, we propose a scheme to improve the hierarchical routing algorithm in ZigBee networks by employing the neighbor table that is originally used together with the routing table. We suggest selecting the neighbor node that has the minimum remaining hops to the destination as the next hop node. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme saves more than 30% of the hop counts compared with the original hierarchical routing.