Efficient Data Collection in IoT Networks Using Trajectory Encoded With Geometric Shapes

The mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm changes the role of edge devices from data producers and requesters to data consumers and processors. MEC mitigates the bandwidth limitation between the edge server and the remote cloud by directly processing the large amount of data locally generated by the network of the internet of things (IoT) at the edge. An efficient data-gathering scheme is crucial for providing quality of service (QoS) within MEC. To reduce redundant data transmission, this paper proposes a data collection scheme that only gathers the necessary data from IoT devices (like wireless sensors) along a trajectory. Instead of using and transmitting location information (which may leak the location anonymity), a virtual coordinate system called “distance vector of hops to anchors” (DV-Hop) is used. The proposed trajectory encoding algorithm uses ellipse and hyperbola constraints to encode the position of interest (POI) and the trajectory route to the POI. Sensors make routing decisions only based on the geometric constraints and the DV-Hop information, both of which are stored in their memory. Also, the proposed scheme can work in heterogeneous networks (with different radio ranges) where each sensor can calculate the average one-hop distance within the POI dynamically. The proposed DV-Hop updating algorithm enables the users to collect data in an IoT network with mobile nodes. The experiments show that in heterogeneous IoT networks, the proposed data collection scheme outperforms two other state-of-the-art topology-based routing protocols, called ring routing, and nested ring. The results also show that the proposed scheme has better latency, reliability, coverage, energy usage, and provide location privacy compared to state-of-the-art schemes.