The seamless operation of inter-connected smart devices in Internet of Things (IoT) wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires consistently available end-to-end routes. However, the sensor nodes that rely on a very limited power source tend to cause disconnection in multi-hop routes due to power shortages in the WSNs, which eventually results in the inefficiency of the overall IoT network. In addition, the density of the available sensor nodes affects the existence of feasible routes and the level of path multiplicity in the WSNs. Therefore, an efficient routing mechanism is expected to extend the lifetime of the WSNs by adaptively selecting the best routes for the data transfer between interconnected IoT devices. In this work, we propose a novel routing mechanism to balance the energy consumption among all the nodes and elongate the WSN lifetime, which introduces a score value assigned to each node along a path as the combination of evaluation metrics. Specifically, the scoring scheme considers the information of the node density at a certain area and the node energy levels in order to represent the importance of individual nodes in the routes. Furthermore, our routing mechanism allows for incorporating non-cooperative nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed work gives comparatively better results than some other experimented protocols.
Keywords: IoT; WSN; energy efficiency; load balancing; routing.