Online Expansion Technology for Dynamic Topology Changing ZigBee Wireless Sensor Networks

In ZigBee, the router capable devices have restriction to accept a number of devices as children devices. A router capable device can not allow any new device to join as a child device if it reaches to the maximum capacity of children or depth limit. According to ZigBee specification each device has a permanent 64-bit MAC address. If a device joins a ZigBee network, it receives a short 16-bit MAC address from the parent device. If a device can not join a network, it isolates from the network and becomes an orphan node even though address spaces are available in the network. The orphan problem becomes worse when the topology of the network changes dynamically. In this paper we propose an online expansion technology to connect the maximum number of devices specially for dynamic topology changing ZigBee wireless sensor networks. The proposed technology shares available address spaces of the router devices to reduce the number of orphan nodes in the network.