Elsevier

Ad Hoc Networks

Volume 117, 1 June 2021, 102495
Ad Hoc Networks

A dynamic multi-sink routing protocol for static and mobile self-organizing wireless networks: A routing protocol for Internet of Things

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2021.102495Get rights and content

Abstract

With the rapid advent of using various devices like smart phones, vehicles etc, the connection of these devices with the help of Internet connectivity has emerged to IoT paradigm. The interconnection of smart objects under the various real world constraints like communication technologies, network scalability, node mobility, energy consumption etc, is a big challenge and requires designing new robust, adaptive, dynamic, and configurable routing protocols. With the arrival of the 5G and the future Internet, the latency time will be extremely reduced, this motivated us to propose a new protocol that entrust internet to transport a large part of control and data traffic of the network. In this paper, a dynamic multi-sink routing protocol (DMS-RP) is proposed for self-organizing multi-hop WSNs, iMANETs and IoT, it uses a sink-based auto-clustering of the network without using a dedicated clustering algorithm and it allows a multipoint-to-multipoint communication for local areas as well as for distant separated areas. Three multi-hop forwarding techniques of the proposed protocol are studied: BASIC, MULTIPARENT and MULTIPARENT+SNR. We have implemented the proposed protocol as a new module for NS-3 simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves a largely better performance in terms of packet delivery, network delay, overhead, energy and network lifetime when compared with one of common multi-hop self-organizing routing protocols (AODV). Furthermore, the protocol analysis shows its high efficiency regarding scalability for static as well as for mobile networks where the studied performances are not significantly affected by the network size which makes it a suitable routing protocol for large-scale network architectures.

Introduction

Currently, billions of things like sensors, smartphones, computers, vehicles, and many other devices use wireless communication, are connected to the internet using different standards through various combined sets of wireless networks from where the paradigm of the Internet of Things is born. Wireless Self-Organizing Networks cover many types of emerging networks such as wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs), wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and many other sub-classes like vehicular ad hoc networks, smart-phone ad hoc networks, wireless mesh sensor networks (WMSNs), etc. Fig. 1 shows the overlapping aspect of the main emerging self-organizing wireless networks.

Advancements in wireless communication networks have led researchers to develop many routing protocols to deal with the stringent requirements of various types of networks. However, designing new communication protocols that consider interoperability between different kinds of self-organizing wireless networks is necessary and a challenging task [1], and should cover the consideration of different characteristics and constraints of each type of network like mobility in MANETs, energy in WSNs and many other constraints.

Nevertheless, in the literature, the most studied algorithms assume that all the nodes can always communicate directly with the BS. This assumption may be quite restrictive for many applications [2]. Moreover, in wireless transmission, the more the distance increases the more the need for energy consumption. That is why it is preferable to use short-range multi-hop communication so that a node can use the other nodes as relays using wireless channels to reach the destination or the base station. Furthermore, in multi-hop communication, the network coverage area is larger and the throughput is greater. Therefore, transmission power can be reduced by using short distance and consequently reducing signal interference and allows partial reuse of frequencies. For this purpose, multi-hop communication is an important aspect and should be considered in routing protocol designing. However, a relaying node may suffer from energy premature depletion which is an issue to cope with [3].

Using multi-sink architecture and clustering reduces the average traveled distance by packets from source to sink and consequently reduces energy consumption to increase the network lifetime. However, load-balanced clustering is another important issue, where sinks are inevitably used as a relay node to forward the packet to the base station, thereby draining their energy very quickly. The other problem that characterizes some kinds of these networks is the hot spot problem, where the energy is more consumed in the nodes that are closer to the sink. Moreover, nodes in paths that are frequently used for data communication are rapidly depleted in terms of energy. Therefore, while designing clustering algorithms, one should take care, not only the energy consumption and load balancing of the sinks but also that of nodes.

In this paper, we propose a new dynamic hierarchical, multi-sink, multi-hop and multi-parent routing protocol called DMS-RP for wireless self-organizing networks. The routing protocol assumes that some nodes have internet access (Sinks). It can exploit internet to transport data and routing messages through sinks with the help of an eventual cloud server that run the same protocol. To deal with the problem of energy (load balancing and hot spot problem), scalability, and reliability, the proposed protocol uses an auto-clustering approach based on sink nodes. Three multi-hop forwarding versions of the proposed protocol are studied; BASIC, MULTIPARENT and MULTIPARENT+SNR. The protocol is dynamic in the sense that nodes have the ability to change their behavior by switching its state from SimpleNode to SinkNode and vice versa. The second dynamic aspect is that it is designed for static and mobile environments. The third dynamic aspect is that nodes can change their affiliation to parents over time depending on the received control message information (hop-count, minimum Snr between nodes of a given path). Two main phases are adopted to construct the routing tables using two types of periodic control messages: HELLO messages (broadcast) and ADVERTISE messages (unicast). The objective of broadcasting HELLO messages is to construct up-paths from different nodes to sinks (and to the server) stored in a routing table called RoutingTableUP. The objective of sending ADVERTISE messages is to construct down-paths from some nodes (server, sinks or simple nodes) to their sub-nodes (children) stored in a routing table called RoutingTableDOWN. A simple node may have multiple parents that leads to the same sink or to different sinks but only one path can be selected for data routing and ADVERTISE message forwarding. However, nodes could have only one down-path for a given child node.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The related work is reviewed in Section 2. Section 3 describes our proposed routing protocol in detail. Section 4 presents an example scenario of using control messages in DMP-RP. Simulation evaluation and performance analysis of DMS-RP are presented in Section 5. Finally, the conclusion is presented in Section 6

Section snippets

Related works

Through several works such as [4], [5], [6], [7] and [8] multi-sink routing is investigated as a possible solution for hot spot problem in WSNs, to minimize the energy consumption and to distribute the network traffic; to increase the network lifetime and improve its scalability. Using a multi-sink network architecture can provide shorter paths to send data from the source to the base station through the nearest sink. This architecture reduces the delay, the number of hops, and the routing

Protocol design

DMS-RP is a distributed, multi-sink, multi-hop, multi-parent, cross-layer protocol based on sink-clustering. It allows MP2MP communication between intra-cluster nodes as well as between inter-cluster nodes. It uses the internet to manage communication between different clusters (in the same zone or separate zones) and their affiliated nodes which highly reduces the routing overhead of the network by not only avoiding the exchange of the control messages between different clusters but also

Example scenario of using control messages in DMP-RP

The following paragraphs show a routing scenario example using the DMS-PR routing protocol of eight nodes, of which five are simple nodes (B, C, D, F, G), two are sink nodes (A and E) and one server (S). Knowing that XA and XE are the external gateway addresses of sinks A and E to join internet. The example shows how the control messages (HELLO, ADVERTISE and SrvADVERTISE) are exchanged and how the related routing tables are filled.

Experimental evaluation and result discussion

In addition to the comparison study of the three DMS-RP operating modes (BASIC, MULTIPARENT and MULTIPARENT+SNR), the performances are also compared to those of the predominant routing protocol designed for MANETs (AODV) [17]. AODV is chosen as a reference by being the most studied protocol among the routing protocols in self-organizing networks where several dozen varieties of this kind of protocols are either inspired by AODV or compared to it. Many scenarios are considered, in which the

Conclusion

The routing in MANETs, WSNs and many other types of wireless multi-hop networks are among the most-studied and practically relevant routing problems. Yet, almost most research thus far has been targeted at solving routing problems with not more than a few hundred nodes; the performance of a network is exponentially deteriorated for large scale networks. In this paper, we presented DMS-RP, a multi-hop routing protocol based internet efficient for large scale MANETs, WSNs and IoT networks, that

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the Directorate General for Scientific Research and Technological Development (DGRSDT) , under the authority of the Algerian Ministry of Scientific Research (MESRS) for the acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.

Mohamed Skander Daas is an assistant professor at University of Freres Mentouri Constantine 1. He is also a researcher at Modeling and Implementation of Complex Systems (MISC) laboratory. He received his engineer degree in computer science (Parallel and Distributed Systems) from University of Mentouri Constantine in 2007, a Magister degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Imaging from university of Oum-El-Bouaghi in 2014 and his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from University of

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Mohamed Skander Daas is an assistant professor at University of Freres Mentouri Constantine 1. He is also a researcher at Modeling and Implementation of Complex Systems (MISC) laboratory. He received his engineer degree in computer science (Parallel and Distributed Systems) from University of Mentouri Constantine in 2007, a Magister degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Imaging from university of Oum-El-Bouaghi in 2014 and his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from University of Abdelhamid Mehri Constantine 2 in 2020. His current research projects focus on routing in mobile Ad-Hoc networks, IoT and computational intelligence.

Salim Chikhi received his M.Sc. degree in computer systems from University Mentouri of Constantine, Algeria, in collaboration with Glasgow University, UK, in 1993. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from University Mentouri of Constantine, Algeria in 2005. Currently, he is a full professor at the University Constantine2, Algeria. He is the head of MISC laboratory (Modeling and Implementation of Complex Systems) and the leader of the SCAL team (Soft Computing and Artificial Life). His research areas include soft computing and artificial life techniques and their applications to real life problems, namely routing in logistics, biometry, and natural language processing.

El-Bay Bourennane is Professor of Electronics at ImVia laboratory, (Imagerie et Vision Artificielle), University of Burgundy, Dijon, France. His research interest includes Dynamic reconfigurable systems, Image processing, embedded system, FPGA design and Real-time systems.

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