Hybrid RPL-based sensing and routing protocol for smart city

Purpose Wireless sensor network (WSN) and mobile crowd sensing (MCS) technologies face some challenges, especially when deployed in a large environment such as a smart city environment. WSN faces network latency, packets delivery and limited lifetime due to the nature of the used constrained internet of things small devices and low power network. On the other hand, most of the current applications that adapt MCS technology use 3G or long term evalution network to collect data and send them directly to the server. This leads to higher battery and bandwidth consumption and higher data cost. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes a hybrid routing protocol based on the routing protocol (RPL) protocol that combines the two wireless sensing technologies (WSN and MCS) and allows the integration between them. The aim is to use MCS nodes in an opportunistic way to support static WSN nodes to enhance the performance. Findings The evaluation of the proposed protocol was conducted in a static WSN to study the impact of the integration on the WSN performance. The results reveal a good enhancement on packet delivery ratio (17% more), end-to-end delay (50% less) and power consumption (25% less) compared with native RPL (without MCS integration). Originality/value The authors believe that the hybrid-RPL protocol can be useful for sensing and data collection purposes, especially in urban areas and smart city contexts.