Routing in the Internet of Things

Sensors, RFID, Wi-Fi, and other technologies embedded with devices and items such as home appliances, vehicles, and grocery items improve the quality of life by exchanging information among each other under a common network platform that defines the emerging future of the Internet, also known as Internet of Things (IoT). Sensors or Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of an integral part of IoT since sensors can be controlled by end users and data can be transmitted to distant sites through Internet. Moreover, thousands of sensors and similar devices poses a great challenge in routing that raises the need for zone-based (or cluster) based routing protocol. Most existing routing protocols are not designed considering the dense architecture of IoT. It is a great challenge to render these algorithms adaptive to the changing requirements of sensor-based IoT applications since their routing policies are mostly predetermined. Thus, they are not energy efficient and fault tolerant for such mobility centric IoT. In this article, we provide a brief introduction to IoT with the current state-of- the-art research and classify routing protocols based on several factors. We then introduce a Multiple Base station and Packet Priority-based Clustering scheme (MBPP) for IoT and evaluate its performance through simulations.