Recent advances in technology have made low-cost, low-power wireless sensors a reality. A network of such nodes can coordinate among themselves for distributed sensing and processing of certain phenomena. In this paper, we propose an architecture to provide a stateless solution in sensor networks for efficient addressing and routing. We name our architecture TreeCast.

We propose a unique method of address allocation, building up multiple disjoint trees which are geographically inter-twined and rooted at the data sink. Using these trees, routing messages to and from the sink node without maintaining any routing state in the sensor nodes is possible. Next, we use this address allocation method for scoped addressing, through which sensor nodes of a particular type or in a particular region can be targeted. Evaluation of our protocol using ns-2 simulations shows how well our addressing and routing schemes perform.