A Resource Oriented Route Selection Framework Using Contextual Information Based on Fuzzy Logic

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to have a significant impact on city’s service provisioning and make a smart city more accessible and pragmatic since the deployment of heterogeneous smart devices in each infrastructure of cities is increasing. So far, the IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is considered to fit on IoT infrastructure for achieving the expected network requirements. While RPL meets the IoT network requirements quite well, there are some issues that need to be addressed, such as adaptability to network dynamics. This issue significantly limits the use of RPL in many smart city application scenarios, such as emergency alerts with high traffic flows. As part of a smart city vision, IoT applications are becoming more diverse, which requires context-awareness in routing protocols to support the behavior of the network. To address this issue, we design an objective function that performs the route selection based on fuzzy logic techniques while using contextual information from the application. For this, we present a new context-oriented objective function (COOF) that comprises both nodes as well as link metrics. Further, we suggest two new routing metrics, known as queue fluctuation index (QFI) and residual energy index (REI), which consider the status of queue utilization and remaining energy, respectively. The metrics used are designed to respond to the dynamic needs of the network. The proposed approach has been examined and evaluated in different scenarios when compared to other similar approach and default RPL objective functions. Simulation experiments are conducted in Cooja network simulator for Contiki OS. The evaluation results show that COOF can cope with network dynamics and IoT-based smart city application requirements.