Energy aware routing for Internet of Things with heterogeneous devices

This paper focuses on the impact of intelligent topology formation and routing on resilient mesh topologies consisting of heterogeneous devices in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. We consider a Bluetooth network comprising of low-power short-range devices that are heterogeneous in terms of energy source (e.g. the mains or coin-cell). In the first step, a resilient mesh topology is created by taking into account device characteristics such as energy sources and parameters related to neighbors. The Bluetooth devices negotiate master and slave roles, and form piconets which are then connected through multiple bridge nodes thus forming a scatternet. An energy aware algorithm is proposed to select the routing paths for packet forwarding between connected devices. The performance of topology and routing is evaluated through simulations in a large indoor office scenario based on realistic channel models and propagation characteristics. Results show that intelligent topology formation, in conjunction with the proposed energy aware routing algorithm leads to a significant gain (more than 100%) in terms of network lifetime, when compared to the baseline approaches.