An Improved Orphan Nodes-Reduced Mechanism in ZigBee Network

Abstract

In ZigBee network, the network address assignment scheme is simple, but it restricts the child device number of some parent and the maximum network depth. And the scheme can not ensure all the devices to assign the addresses, even if there are some remaining address spaces. So some devices that are called orphan nodes can not join the network. Based on deeply studying the network formation in ZigBee network, an improved orphan nodes-reduced (IONR) mechanism has been proposed in this paper: using the two reserved bits in beacon payload fully according to the features of ZR and ZED; modifying the connection of joining nodes and potential parents by using the reserved bits and additional commands. The mechanism could reduce the orphan nodes and effectively improve the connectivity of ZigBee network, which avoided additional overhead based on constant length of beacon payload.

Adaptive nodes algorithm to solve the orphan nodes problem in a ZigBee Tree WSN

“…If there are no paths to transmit information, then the proposed routing algorithms mentioned before might not repair the network, and the coverage of the network will decrease. Some solutions have been proposed by managing addresses in the network and modifying the connection of joining nodes and their potential parents [14,15,16,17] to solve the orphan nodes problem; also, in [18], Yang, Xu & Qiu proposed an algorithm to transform ZED into ZR by pressing a button. We present a solution based on hybrid nodes in this work, where the sensor nodes have both features, ZED and ZR.…”