Distributed coordination protocol for event data exchange in IoT monitoring applications

Abstract

Publish-subscribe architecture is one of the dominating architectural styles in designing the Internet of things (IoT) monitoring applications. Establishment of a brokerless publish-subscribe system leads to exchanging a high number of control messages including advertise, subscribe and update messages. Additionally, the in-efficiency in forwarding publish messages in a resource-constrained IoT environment results in network congestion, communication delay, and energy loss. The recent approaches in brokerless publish-subscribe systems for IoT domain introduced new communication protocols, maintaining routing tables of IoT nodes, and clustering the network. However, the efficiency in exchanging control messages does not receive much attention. In this paper, we propose an enhanced communication protocol to establish a brokerless publish-subscribe IoT system. The protocol is based on beaconing for packet dissemination. We applied a new structure that provides metadata in the packet header that facilitates the receivers regarding their next possible actions. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the network traffic by 28% on average and decreases the energy consumption of nodes up to 33%. The results also reveal that the number of publish messages is reduced by 10% in comparison to the baseline method.