Efficient Next-Hop Selection in Multi-Hop Routing for IoT Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm allows the integration of cyber and physical worlds and other emerging technologies. IoT-enabled wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are rapidly gaining interest due to their ability to aggregate sensing data and transmit it towards the central or intermediate repositories, such as computational clouds and fogs. This paper presents an efficient multi-hop routing protocol (EMRP) for efficient data dissemination in IoT-enabled WSNs where hierarchy-based energy-efficient routing is involved. It considers a rank-based next-hop selection mechanism. For each device, it considers the residual energy to choose the route for data exchange. We extracted the residual energy at each node and evaluated it based on the connection degree to validate the maximum rank. It allowed us to identify the time slots for measuring the lifetime of the network. We also considered the battery expiry time of the first node to identify the network expiry time. We validated our work through extensive simulations using Network Simulator. We also implemented TCL scripts and C language code to configure low-power sensing devices, cluster heads and sink nodes. We extracted results from the trace files by utilizing AWK scripts. Results demonstrate that the proposed EMRP outperforms the existing related schemes in terms of the average lifetime, packet delivery ratio, time-slots, communication lost, communication area, first node expiry, number of alive nodes and residual energy.