Z-Cast: A Multicast Routing Mechanism in ZigBee Cluster-Tree Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Group communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) requires an efficient multicast routing mechanism due to inherent resources and computing constraints of sensor nodes. ZigBee, which is a standard protocol that represents a very prominent technology for WSNs, does not consider multicast routing in its specification. In this paper, a group is defined as a set of nodes that share the same sensory information. The main contributions of this paper are two-folded: First, we propose Z-Cast, an efficient multicast routing mechanism for groups that share the same sensory information in a cluster-tree WSN. Second, we show how to integrate the Z-Cast mechanism in open-ZB which is an open source IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee implementation. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency and backward compatibility of our proposal with the standard specification.