Performance Assessment of the LOADng Routing Protocol in Smart City Scenarios

Current smart city scenarios are strongly related to the use of wireless communications for providing a ubiquitous and pervasive network. The used wireless network devices are nodes with several restrictions in terms of hardware, energy, and communication. Due to these limitations, the selection of the appropriated routing protocol represents an important task in order to seek an efficient network. Although the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is used in a great variety of smart city applications, recent studies have been identifying some drawbacks and limitations of this protocol. In this context, the Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector Routing Protocol (LOADng) can emerge as an important alternative to RPL. The LOADng is a reactive routing protocol continuously used and evaluated in various network scenarios, but its performance in a smart city network was not studied yet. Hence, this work presents a performance evaluation study considering the use of LOADng in a smart city scenario. The routing protocol was evaluated using different routing metrics aiming to define the most appropriated one for a smart city application. The LOADng and the various routing metrics described in the paper were evaluated considering the packet delivery ratio, latency, number of hops, spent energy per bit, and network energy consumption. The results express that LOADng can present an efficient performance in applications with constant periodical data messages, but it is decreased when the messages are sent sporadically.