Unified routing for data dissemination in smart city networks

The Internet of Things continues to expand from traditional homogeneous technologies with low resources to increasingly heterogeneous and resource rich technologies. An emerging domain in this respect is the use of mobile phones to monitor and process events. Moreover, there is increasing interest in expanding the application domains, such as to smart cities. Existing routing algorithms for such technologies and application domains are still designed for homogeneous technologies, such as mobile phones, vehicles, and Road Side Units. In this paper, we propose a new routing scheme for a heterogeneous architecture that is composed of a heterogeneous set of nodes. Our proposed routing algorithm uses two parameters, namely the Delivery Capability and Number of Copies, to control the dissemination area and connection priority. By optimally choosing these two parameters according to characteristics of nodes, the proposed algorithm works well with various types of sensor node. In addition, a heterogeneous network architecture and several mobility models are introduced to obtain a realistic simulation scenario. The simulation results show that our proposed approach outperforms all other compared algorithms in terms of delivery ratio and latency.