Address autoconfiguration for event-driven sensor network

An event-driven sensor network composed of a large number of sensor nodes has been widely studied. A sensor node sends packets to a sink when the node detects an event. For the sink to receive packets it fails to acquire, the sink must send re-transmission requests to the sensor node. To send the requests to the sensor node using unicast, the network address of the sensor node is required to distinguish the sensor node from others. Since it is difficult to allocate the address manually to a number of nodes, a reasonable option is to use existing address autoconfiguration methods. However, the methods waste the limited energy of the sensor nodes due to using a number of control messages to allocate a permanent address to every node. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient address autoconfiguration method for the event-driven sensor network. The proposed method allocates a temporary address only to a sensor node which detects an event, on an on-demand basis. By per-forming simulation studies, we evaluated the proposed method and compared it with one of the existing methods based on the number of control messages for the address allocation. The results show that the number of control messages of the proposed method is small compared to that of the existing method. We also evaluated the process time overhead of the proposed method using the implemented system. Although the proposed method has little extra overhead, the results show the processing time is short enough for practical use.