On the Relevance of Using Interference and Service Differentiation Routing in the Internet-of-Things

Abstract

Next generation sensor networks are predicted to be deployed in the Internet-of-the-Things (IoT) with a high level of heterogeneity. They will be using sensor motes which are equipped with different sensing and communication devices and tasked to deliver different services leading to different energy consumption patterns. The application of traditional wireless sensor routing algorithms designed for sensor motes expanding the same energy to such heterogeneous networks may lead to energy unbalance and subsequent short-lived sensor networks resulting from routing the sensor readings over the most overworked sensor nodes while leaving the least used nodes idle. Building upon node interference awareness and sensor devices service identification, we assess the relevance of using a routing protocol that combines these two key features to achieve efficient traffic engineering in IoT settings and its relative efficiency compared to traditional sensor routing. Performance evaluation with simulation reveals clear improvement of the proposed protocol vs. state of the art solutions in terms of load balancing, notably for critical nodes that cover more services. Results show that the proposed protocol considerably reduce the number of packets routed by critical nodes, where the difference with the compared protocol becomes more and more important as the number of nodes increases. Results also reveal clear reduction in the average energy consumption.