Utilizing Neighbours-Table to Improve Tree Routing Protocol in ZigBee Network

ZigBee is an industrial standard for wireless ad hoc networks based on IEEE 802.15.4. It has been developed for low cost, low data rate and low power consumption. ZigBee??s network layer defines two routing protocols namely Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector and Tree Routing (TR). TR protocol follows the tree topology (parent?Cchild) in forwarding the data packets from source nodes to the sink node. However, the source does not find rather nor the location of the sink is close to the source node or if it is not in the sub-tree. In this case it will follow the tree topology which will use a lot of hops to deliver data packets to the sink node. This paper present an improvement of TR protocol for ZigBee network and is called Improved Tree Routing (ImpTR) protocol which is computationally simple in discovering the better path to transmit data packets to the sink node, and does not need any addition in hardware. ImpTR determines the better path to the sink node depending on the tables of the neighbouring nodes, which is part of the existing ZigBee network specification. Results show that the proposed algorithm provides shorter average end-to-end delay, increase throughput, decrease the average number of hops and decrease the energy consumption from the network when compared to the original TR routing protocol.