FOLLOWER: A Fog-based peer-to-peer routing protocol for mobile Internet of Things

The great breakthrough in the Mobile Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a wide range of application domains but has also raised new challenges, especially for routing protocols. In fact, the IoT devices’ mobility leads to routes instability which increases the packet error rate. Additionally, the energy shortage of IoT devices accentuates the routing protocol problems since routing is one of the most important sources of energy whereas the IoT devices suffer from the energy shortage. In this paper, we propose FOLLOWER: Fog-based routing protocol for mobile IoT devices. FOLLOWER exploits the proximity of fog nodes to mobile IoT devices to offer a robust routing protocol that can ensure energy and time-efficient routing while handling IoT objects’ mobility. FOLLOWER divides the IoT network into clusters. Each cluster is led by a fog node. The main routing tasks are done using the fog nodes that are using the Chord protocol for efficient lookup. The performance evaluation has proved that FOLLOWER managed to save time and energy and to handle efficiently IoT nodes mobility.