Adaptive Load Balanced Routing in heterogeneous IoT networks

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) involves integrating and forwarding data generated by heterogeneous sensing devices (IoT devices). The data is sent using various wireless technologies to application servers present in the IoT cloud via intermediate gateways. Using traditional routing techniques to connect millions of IoT devices to the Internet result in congestion and overloading of gateways leading to drop in throughput of IoT networks. To improve the throughput, the use of multiple wireless technologies for parallel data transmission known as Parallel Opportunistic Routing (POR) has been proposed in the literature. However, in POR the data from a source gateway to the Internet always follows the same path. This leads to congestion in certain gateways which in turn affects the throughput. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an adaptive and load balanced routing technique called Adaptive Routing using Multi-technologY and Load balancer (ARMY-Lancer) for maximizing IoT networks' throughput by distributing the load across the network. Through extensive simulations, we show that ARMY-Lancer outperforms POR and load balanced routing using a single technology in terms of network throughput and average load across the gateways.