SBA: An efficient algorithm for address assignment in ZigBee networks

ZigBee Specification defines a distributed address assignment mechanism (DAAM) for assigning addresses to nodes in ZigBee networks. However, some nodes are likely not to get addresses as DAAM limits the number of child nodes of a router in advance. To address this problem with the spare addresses that DAAM does not use, we first derive an upper bound of the probability that DAAM exhausts the 16-bit address space, and then propose a segmentation-based algorithm (SBA) for on-demand scalable address assignment in ZigBee networks. Through segmenting the 16-bit address space according to the maximum address predefined by DAAM, SBA enables a router to use the addresses in new space segments if it has insufficient addresses to accommodate child nodes. In addition, the tree routing protocol is improved to suit extended addresses. Performance analysis and numerical results reveal that SBA outperforms DAAM and its two improvement versions in terms of the success rate of address assignment, communication overhead, and the average time spent to assign an address.