Energy efficient address allocation in distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

Conserving battery power is a critical requirement in WSNs. Past studies have shown that the transceiving process consumes more energy than internal processing. Our research examines methods by which the transmission overheads can be minimized. We investigate how increasing the number of base-stations contributes to the reduction of transmission overheads. We also present an on-demand address allocation technique as a more efficient alternative to Duplicate Address Detection (DAD). We present experimental data to show that increasing the number of base stations contributes to the reduction of transmission overheads by segmenting the network around each base station. Together with the on-demand address allocation technique that is proposed, this leads to a reduction in the required address space and the number of transmission hops per message. Experiments also show that the gain in performance is also dependant on the positioning of base stations. © 2006 IEEE.