The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines a set of procedures to set-up a Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network where nodes self-organize into a logical communication structure through which data can be routed, hop by hop, from sources to destinations. The network formation of the IEEE 802.15.4 does not impose constraints on the topology. The ZigBee Alliance uses the IEEE 802.15.4 layers to build a complete protocol stack for the implementation of wireless sensor networks. ZigBee specifies the network layer for star, tree and peer-to-peer topologies. Starting from these, more complex cluster-tree topologies can be formed. To control the network topology ZigBee fixes the maximum number of routers and end-devices that each router may have as children and also fixes the maximum depth of the tree. To better understand the importance of these constraints we simulate and analyze the IEEE 802.15.4 formation procedure in different network settings (single-sink and multi-sink scenarios). The goal is to provide guidelines for the practical implementation of ZigBee network formation with the aforementioned constraints.

An IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor network is considered, and the relationship between the IEEE 802.15.4 topology formation mechanism and possible routing strategies at the network layer is studied. Two alternative routing schemes proposed in the framework of the ZigBee alliance are analyzed. The first is the well-known ad-hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol, which was designed for highly dynamic application scenarios in wireless ad-hoc networks. The second is a tree-based routing scheme based on a hierarchical structure established among nodes during the network formation phase. This latter approach, referred to as HERA (hierarchical routing algorithm) in the paper, routes packets from sensors to sink based on the parent-child relationships established by the IEEE 802.15.4 topology formation procedure. An extensive simulation analysis is carried out to compare HERA and AODV. It is shown that a hierarchical routing scheme based on the MAC association procedures offers several benefits with respect to reactive routing in typical sensor network applications. Moreover, it is to be noted that most sensor network scenarios are concerned with delivery of packets from a series of static sensors to a single, static, sink.

This paper investigates the topology formation mechanisms provided by IEEE 802.15.4 to create tree-based topologies, in the context of a multi-sink wireless sensor network. the topology formation protocol is simulated starting from a random deployment of a given number of nodes, to obtain statistics of the position of those nodes belonging to given tree levels. It is shown that under some circumstances the nodes belonging to any level can be assumed to be uniformly distributed over the plane. Under such assumption, a mathematical formulation is used to optimize the average number of children per parent and the number of levels in the tree (that is, the tree height), through maximization of the network association probability