PriNergy: a priority-based energy-efficient routing method for IoT systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) devices gather a plethora of data by sensing and monitoring the surrounding environment. Transmission of collected data from the IoT devices to the cloud through relay nodes is one of the many challenges that arise from IoT systems. Fault tolerance, security, energy consumption and load balancing are all examples of issues revolving around data transmissions. This paper focuses on energy consumption, where a priority-based and energy-efficient routing (PriNergy) method is proposed. The method is based on the routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL) model, which determines routing through contents. Each network slot uses timing patterns when sending data to the destination, while considering network traffic, audio and image data. This technique increases the robustness of the routing protocol and ultimately prevents congestion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PriNergy method reduces overhead on the mesh, end-to-end delay and energy consumption. Moreover, it outperforms one of the most successful routing methods in an IoT environment, namely the quality of service RPL (QRPL).