Multipath Load Balancing Routing for Internet of Things

Abstract

In the next-generation technology, Internet of Things (IoT), billions of smart objects will communicate with one another to make human lives more convenient. IoT is based on wireless sensor network (WSN), and Zigbee is one of the most popular WSN protocols. A mature IoT environment involves heavy WSN data transmission causing bottleneck problems. However, Zigbee’s AODV routing stack does not have load balance mechanism to handle bursty traffic. Therefore, we develop Multipath Load Balancing (MLB) Routing to substitute Zigbee’s AODV routing. Our proposed MLB consists of two main designs: LAYER_DESIGN and LOAD_BALANCE. LAYER_DESIGN assigns nodes into different layers based on node distance to IoT gateway. Nodes can have multiple next-hops delivering IoT data. All neighboring layer nodes exchange flow information containing current load, used by LOAD_BALANCE to estimate future load of next-hops. With MLB, nodes can choose the neighbors with the least load as the next-hops and thus can achieve load balance and avoid bottlenecks. Compared with Zigbee’s AODV and multipath version AODV (AOMDV), experiment results demonstrate that MLB achieves better load balance, lower packet loss rate, and better routing connectivity ratio in both grid and random uniform topologies. MLB provides a more convincing routing solution for IoT applications.