Distributed assignment of encoded MAC addresses in sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, the vast majority of wide-scale traffic consists of only a few bytes, including all network and application layer IDs. Therefore, MAC addresses, which are vital in a shared medium, present major overhead, particularly because they are traditionally chosen network-wide unique. To tackle this overhead, we propose a dynamic MAC addressing scheme based on a distributed algorithm. The assigned addresses are reused spatially and represented by variable length codewords. Our scheme scales very well with the network size, rendering it well suited for sensor networks with thousands or millions of nodes