Abstract - Group communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) requires an efficient multicast routing mechanism due to inherent resource and computing constraints of sensor nodes. ZigBee , which is a standard protocol that represent a very prominent technology for WSNs, does not consider multicast routing in its specification. In this paper, a group is definedas a set of nodes that share the same sensory information. The main contribution of this paper is two-folded. First, we propose Z-Cast, an efficient multicast routing mechanism for groups that share the same sensory information in cluster-tree networks/ Second, we show how to integrate the Z-cast mechanism in open -ZB which is open source IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee implementation. Finally , we demonstrate the efficiency and backward compatibility of our proposal with the standard specification.
