MAEER: Mobility aware energy efficient routing protocol for Internet of Things

Abstract

In many IoT applications, Point-to-Point communication (P2P communication) and mobility are fundamental requirements. For such applications, routing protocols must support mobility and discover optimum P2P routes along with the energy-efficiency. The nodes in IoT have limited energy. Fast energy depletion of nodes leads to the creation of energy holes in the network, which hinders the intended services to IoT application. Hence, energy-efficiency is also one of the fundamental objectives of routing protocols. In the literature, many researchers have proposed energy-efficient routing protocols that provide optimum P2P routes. But most of them do not support mobility of nodes in the network. In this paper, Mobility Aware Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (MAEER) for Internet of Things is proposed that supports mobility and discovers nearly optimum routes with reduced energy consumption. The proposed protocol reduces the number of participating nodes in P2P route discovery to decrease the energy consumption. In addition to that, it also offers an efficient approach to provide mobility support with increased packet delivery ratio. The performance of our routing protocol is analyzed with benchmark protocols i.e. RPL, P2P-RPL, along with ME-RPL. The results show that the proposed protocol provides 24% less energy consumption in comparison to P2P-RPL which is best among RPL, P2P-RPL, and ME-RPL, and 15% better packet delivery ratio than ME-RPL which provides best packet delivery ratio among the three.