Research on IPv6 address configuration for wireless sensor networks

The paper proposes an IPv6 address configuration scheme for wireless sensor networks. In the scheme, one wireless sensor network is divided into multiple clusters and the scheme creates the IPv6 address formats for the cluster heads and the cluster members respectively. Based on the proposed IPv6 address format, the scheme proposes to adopt the division method of the hash function to allocate the IPv6 addresses for the cluster heads and cluster members and to utilize linear probing to deal with assigned address collision. From the perspectives of duplicate address detection cost, address configuration cost and address configuration delay time, the paper analyzes and compares the performances of Strong DAD, MANETConf and the proposed scheme. Analytical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.