Improving the Performance of LOADng Routing Protocol in Mobile IoT Scenarios

Routing protocols represent an important issue on the Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios since they are responsible for creating paths and forwarding data packets among the network nodes. In mobile IoT scenarios, the topology changes caused by the movement of nodes makes the work of routing protocols more difficult. Thus, the current IoT routing solutions tend to present strong limitations and a poor performance in these scenarios, generally requiring complex additional improvement to better support the mobility of the devices. In this context, the Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector Routing Protocol – Next Generation (LOADng), is an emerging solution for IoT networks that despite being adequate for a mobile environment due to its reactive functioning still lacks in performance. Thus, this paper proposes a novel solution to enhance the performance of LOADng in mobile IoT networks. The improved version, LOADng-IoT-Mob, introduces a mechanism that permits nodes to be aware of the availability of their neighbors through the harnessing of control messages. As a result, these nodes can shorten paths and avoid sending data packets through broken routes due to the movement of the nodes. Additionally, a short periodical control message is introduced, allowing the nodes to update their routing table, even with a low control message frequency. Furthermore, a new routing metric is proposed for creating routes based on the reliability of the link and proximity of the neighboring nodes. Finally, through computational simulations, the performance of the LOADng-IoT-Mob is studied under multiple scenarios varying the network size, the number of mobile devices, and maximum nodes’ speed. The results obtained demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution in terms of packet delivery ratio, latency, and power and overhead efficiency, with a slight increase in memory consumption.