Revisiting directed diffusion in the era of IoT-WSNs: Power control for adaptation to high density

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been recognized as a crucial and enabling technology in the world of Internet of Things (IoT). However, their integration with IoT arises new design challenges, compared to conventional WSNs applications. This paper addresses the challenge of high node density and its impact on the design of IoT-WSNs routing protocols. We propose a power-aware topology control mechanism built upon the prominent routing scheme, Directed Diffusion. Moreover, we take benefit from the power-awareness feature of the topology control mechanism in order to compute an energy consumption metric, allowing the selection of energy-efficient routes. The simulation results demonstrate an improvement by the proposed protocol in terms of energy efficiency, data reporting delays and delivery success rate.