Energy efficient anchor zone based routing protocol for IoT networks

Abstract

The day-to-day applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) in three-dimensional (3D) resource constrained IoT networks usually involve a transfer of data from several intermediary nodes. Where the unavailability of an efficient routing path leads to consumption of energy at nodes. In addition to this, it has been found that the nodes may get stuck at points where no path is available in the forward direction, while dealing with data transfer in a large geographical space. The non-availability of the forward path leads to the creation of void node problem (VNP). However, the literature revealed that the anchor-based methods are utilized to detour from VNP, but this leads to the overloading of the anchor node when multiple sources traverse the same path. So, this paper proposes a novel energy-efficient anchor zone-based routing (EAZR) protocol, where, the traffic passes through different nodes of the anchor zone rather than a single anchor node. The proposed protocol effectively divides the traffic among multiple nodes based on residual energy and this minimizes the energy consumption during data transmission in 3D resource-constrained IoT networks. This proposed method has been implemented using OMNET++ simulator and obtained simulation results have shown its supremacy over existing state-of-art techniques in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, and other quality of service (QoS) parameters.