Fog-Based Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Smart Building Evacuations

In this paper, we propose a novel Fog-based Energy Efficient Routing (FEER) protocol designed to enhance energy conservation and network performance in smart buildings during emergency evacuations. The FEER protocol employs an adaptive level-wise clustering approach by considering various factors such as remaining energy, distance between nodes and the sink, and floor location. Additionally, FEER utilizes the theta-Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA)-III to optimize communication between sensor nodes and the sink. However, FEER comes up with some additional computational overheads, therefore, in the abnormal circumstances, such as emergency evacuations, the proposed FEER protocol allows sensor nodes to utilize their own intelligence to optimize evacuation routes and communicates critical information to emergency services. Therefore, the proposed FEER-theta-NSA-III protocol offers a robust solution for energy-efficient routing and enhanced safety in smart buildings. Among the proposed FEER variants and other competitive protocols, FEER-theta-NSGA-III outperforms in terms of average remaining energy, network stability period, and network lifetime. It also significantly reduces end-to-end delays and achieves higher average remaining energy values. While FEER-theta-NSGA-III resulted in slightly higher computational and overhead time compared to competitive protocols, this increase is minor considering its superior performance in energy conservation, stability period, and network lifetime.