Unit IV

Naming and Addressing

Fundamentals Address and Name management in WSN, assignment in MAC Addresses, content based and geographical
addressing. Hierarchical networks by clustering, Adaptive node activity: geographic adaptive Fidelity (GAF).

Que: What are the different Address and name management task in wireless sensor Networks.
[S/16, S/17, S/19]
Que: Describe in detail the various types of addresses and Names used in WSN. [W/16, W/18]
Que: Explain in detail the various types of addresses & name management tasks used in WSN. [S/18]

4.1_Fundamentals Address and Name management in WSN

Naming and addressing schemes are used to denote and to find things. In networking, names and addresses
often refer to individual nodes as well as to data items stored in them. Addresses/names are always tied to a
representation, which has a certain length when considered as a string of bits. As opposed to other types of
networks, representation size is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks, since addresses are present in almost
any packet. However, coordination among nodes is needed to assign reasonably short addresses.
 Naming and addressing are two fundamental issues in networking
 names are used to denote things (for example, nodes, data, transactions) whereas addresses supply the
information needed to find these things; they help, for example, with routing in a multi-hop network.
 This distinction is not sharp; sometimes addresses are used to denote things too – an IP address contains
information to both find a node (the network part of an address) and to identify a node more precisely: a
network interface within a node – within a single sub network (the host part).

Fundamentals
 Use of addresses and names in (sensor) networks
In most computer and sensor networks, the following types of names, addresses, and identifiers can be
found.
 Unique node identifier
A unique node identifier (UID) is a persistent data item unique for every node. An example of a UID
might be a combination of a vendor name, a product name, and a serial number, assigned at
manufacturing time. Such a UID may or may not have any function in the protocol stack.
 MAC address
A MAC address is used to distinguish between one-hop neighbors of a node. This is particularly
important in wireless sensor networks using contention-based MAC protocols, since by including a
MAC addresses into unicast MAC packets a node can determine which packets are not destined to it
and go into sleep mode while such a packet is in transit. This overhearing avoidance is an important
method of conserving energy at the MAC layer.
 Network address
A network address is used to find and denote a node over multiple hops and therefore network
addresses are often connected to routing. Network identifiers In geographically overlapping wireless
(sensor) networks of the same type and working in the same frequency band, it is also important to
distinguish the networks by means of network identifiers.
 An example where medical body area sensor networks for clinical patients in the same room
have to be distinguished to prevent confusion of sensor data belonging to different patients.
 Resource identifiers
A name or resource identifier is represented in user-understandable terms or in a way that “means
something” to the user.
For example, upon reading the name www.xemacs.org, an experienced user knows that
(i) the thing the name refers to is likely a web server and