QoTa-MPR: QoS-oriented and Traffic-aware Multi-path Routing Protocol for Internet of Remote Things

Abstract Internet of Remote Things (IoRT) is widely used in both military and civilian applications. However, due to the unique characteristics, which is characterized as long-distance and high-latency, the design of the routing protocol is a great challenge of IoRT. In this paper, a QoS-oriented and traffic-aware multi-path routing protocol (QoTa-MRP) is proposed for IoRT. QoTa-MRP is composed of two parts. The first part is the link traffic-aware based multi-paths source route discovery mechanism, which is used to establish multi-paths with lower link disjoint degree. The second part is path similarity and traffic priority based multi-path selection mechanism, which is used to determine the transmission mode of the traffic flows to enhance the reliability or effectiveness of the transmission. Simultaneously, the protocol is theoretically analyzed in terms of the successful transmission rate of routing transmission data packet. Finally, the dynamic source routing, which is a very representative protocol and is usually used as the baseline comparison protocol, is revisited for the performance verification of the QoTa-MRP in IoRT. It is shown in the simulation results that there are significant superiorities of QoTa-MRP than that of DSR in terms of network throughput, packet loss rate and routing packet header overhead in IoRT.