Dynamic address allocation for self-organised management and control in sensor networks

Several data-centric communication paradigms have been proposed in the domain of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Therefore, the principles of operation and maintenance in such networks are changing to control massively distributed systems. Previous addressing schemes fail or produce too much overhead if only locally unique addresses of sensor nodes are required. In this paper, we present a dynamic address allocation scheme for localised address assignments in WSN. We developed a round-based address assignment with subsequent duplicate address detection that operates in a self-organised manner. It inherently allows busy-sleep periods and does not assume always awake nodes. To verify the approach, we implemented the algorithm on Mica2 sensor motes and tested it in a WSN maintenance scenario. The results demonstrate that our method works well for operation and maintenance of WSN without prior address assignments.