Low overhead routing for IEEE 802.11-based Internet-of-Things networks

In multihop IEEE 802.11 IoT networks, efficient routing which means high throughput and low energy consumption is a critical issue. Existing schemes oftentimes rely on explicit `link probing' to estimate the quality of a routing path. This approach is too expensive for IoT networks, as it requires extra traffic generation. In this paper, we propose a scheme, called `Virtual Network emulation-based Routing (VNR)'. We do not rely on `link probing'. Instead, information is obtained by passively sniffing the ongoing traffic. The information obtained at each IoT node is collected at the IoT gateway to derive the statistical properties of the current network. On the basis of the derived properties, the status of the network is estimated, which we call VNR. This result is used to make routing decisions. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme via extensive simulations.