An Improved Emergency Response Routing Protocol for Internet of Things

Due to the limited resources of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes, routing protocols for these networks should be designed in such a way that not only reduce the packet loss rate and transmission delay, but also to utilize the network resources efficiently. In an emergency, routing of emergency data on these networks requires a significant reduction in delay for timely delivery of data. Common IoT routing protocols, including SPEED, EA-SPEED, and RPL, do not differentiate between normal and emergency data. The ERGID protocol has been specifically designed to reduce end-to-end delay for emergency data. A novel emergency response routing protocol based on the ERGID is proposed in this paper to remedy the disadvantage of ERGID protocol in guaranteeing delay for emergency data. The proposed protocol meets the requirements of reliability and energy efficiency for the IoT. To achieve these goals, a prioritization mechanism is designed for emergency data that leads to more resource allocation to emergency packets and thus, reduction in transmission delay of this data. Based on the priority set at the header of the emergency packets, an exclusive route is reserved for these packets for a specified period of time to avoid congestion in emergency paths. The extensive simulations results show that the proposed routing protocol outperforms ERGID in terms of end-to-end delay and packet loss rate by 60% and 35%, respectively.