An energy‐aware load‐balanced routing protocol for ad hoc M2M communications

Abstract

Machine‐to‐machine (M2M) communications will become ubiquitous in the future Internet of Things, and it is important that current wireless networks are developed to support M2M communications. In this paper, we propose an energy‐aware load‐balanced routing protocol for ad hoc M2M communications. Routing is a challenging issue in ad hoc M2M communication networks due to a large number of machine‐type communication (MTC) devices and a lack of infrastructure. Wireless nodes that are used as MTC devices are powered by batteries only. This makes energy efficiency a major issue as each MTC device in the network acts as a router and consumes energy in the routing process. The energy consumption should be reduced to prolong the lifetime of the batteries. Most existing research on energy‐aware routing only focuses on minimising the total energy consumption from the source to the destination device, regardless of the performance degradation caused by the heavy traffic load in the network. The unbalanced traffic load distribution among devices may cause more packet loss and quick battery depletion due to the frequent usage. Unlike existing research, we classify the devices as energy‐critical and load‐critical devices and protect them from participating in the routing frequently. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed routing protocol significantly increases the packet delivery ratio, reduces delay and prolongs the network lifetime compared to ad hoc on‐demand distance vector and dynamic source routing in the heavy load network. Energy‐aware load‐balanced can also provide better performance compared with delay‐aware MChannel and energy‐aware MChannel protocols when devices have very low energy levels in congested networks. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Energy‐efficient multigroup communication

“…Definition According to Zhang et al, the network lifetime, denoted as NL, ends when at least one node is no longer able to produce or deliver the produced payload to the sink.…”

Dynamic link sleeping reconfigurations for green traffic engineering

“…Energy savings is also becoming ubiquitous in other contemporary networks because of its benefits. In machine‐to‐machine communications, Zhang et al proposed a routing protocol that takes cognisance of the traffic load while still saving energy in the network. Invariably, they jointly optimize both energy efficiency and load balancing in the machine‐to‐machine network.…”