Development of Route Tracing Tools in ZigBee Sensor Networks by Multicast

• Main Authors: Li, Shu-Cheng, 李書丞
• Other Authors: Sheu, Meng-Lieh
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/wgpzj7

碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 電機工程學系 === 100 === In this thesis, we presented how to utilize existing ZigBee wireless technologies to develop a route tracing tool based on the multicast mechanism. This tool not only assists network managers to take a peek at the status of ZigBee networks such as routing tables and parent-child relationship of ZigBee network nodes, but also finds out unstable or disconnected points. Furthermore, it can identify unnecessary routers in a network, so this is a valuable tool to shorten the network maintenance time and reduce the cost of deployment. The methods proposed in this thesis achieves high scalability, by utilizing the broadcast and multicast features in ZigBee networks. First, when there are few routers in a network, we can only send one broadcast request packet to obtain the routing tables of all routers, instead of sending a lot of unicast request packets to all nodes. Second, when there are a great amount of routers in a network, routers can be categorized into several groups, according to their floor numbers or room numbers. We can then get the routing tables from all routers by sending multicast packets to different groups. For practical consideration, we may disperse the same request to different groups in an interleaving fashion, so that the responses will not come back simultaneously to cause network conjecture. At last, if we need to monitor a routing path between two particular nodes, we can use the Trace Route mechanism by unicast requests without interfering other nodes. The advantage of the method proposed in this thesis is that we can use the existing mechanism of the ZigBee protocol without purchasing additional equipment, thus reducing the cost of this network management system.