A connectivity-increasing mechanism of ZigBee-based IoT devices for wireless multimedia sensor networks

In recent years, applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) have become a part of our everyday life. Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are a new and emerging application of IoT that contain sensor nodes equipped with cameras, microphones, and other sensors producing multimedia content. ZigBee is the most common standard radio protocol used in WMSNs because of its lightweight standard and its low-cost and low-power characteristics. Most ZigBee network systems are constructed using the tree topology. Using the root node, intermediate nodes, and leaves of this topology, packets can be easily forwarded to the next hop by the tree routing mechanism, which calculates the packet destination address using the distributed address assignment mechanism. However, network parameter constraints cause the orphan node problem. Therefore, we proposed a novel recommendation scheme, the ZigBee connectivity enhancement mechanism (ZCEM), based on the improvement probability and improvement effect of multiparent nodes (MNs) in ZigBee networks. The ZCEM chooses MNs with better IP to connect to other parent nodes to increase the connectivity of ZigBee networks, reducing the number of orphan nodes. The ZCEM is compared to the standard ZigBee mechanism and the ZigBee connectivity-improving mechanism (ZCIM). The results show that the proposed ZCEM improves connectivity in ZigBee networks. The proposed mechanism can achieve a join ratio of 90%, approximately 3% more efficient than the ZCIM, and is 6% more efficient than the standard ZigBee mechanism.