A New Small-World IoT Routing Mechanism Based on Cayley Graphs

An increasing number of low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices will be widely deployed in the near future. Considering the short-range communication of low-power devices, multihop transmissions will become an important transmission mechanism in IoT networks. It is a crucial for low-power devices to transmit data over long distances via multihop in a low-delay and reliable way. The small-world characteristics of networks indicate that the network has an advantage of a small average shortest-path length (ASL) and a high average clustering coefficient (ACC). In this article, a new IoT routing mechanism considering small-world characteristics is proposed to reduce the delay and improve the reliability. The ASL and ACC are derived for the performance analysis of small-world characteristics in IoT networks based on Cayley graphs. Besides, the reliability and delay models are proposed for small-world IoT based on Cayley graphs (SWITCH). The simulation results demonstrate that SWITCH has lower delay and better reliability than that of conventional nearest neighboring routing (NNR). Moreover, the maximum delay of SWITCH is reduced by 50.6% compared with that by NNR.