Including context in a routing algorithm for the internet of things

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThe “Internet of Things” assumes that a large number of devices which are used on a daily basis will eventually become connected to the Internet. This scenario will provide room for a large set of new applications, however the network connections of an enormous set of nodes, which can be connected and disconnected, can move around and which have limitations with regards to their processing and communication capabilities, raises the need for the development of new message routing algorithms, different from those being in use today. In this thesis, a contribution is made towards the development of this type of algorithms. In particular, the idea which is tested is whether routing algorithms can improve their performance at various levels, such as, message delivery time, number of messages lost, power consumption, etc., if in the routing decisions these algorithms can make use of the concept of “Context”. Within the framework of this thesis, the “Context” is the organized collection of information which the routing algorithm collects from the environment surrounding the network nodes, and which allows it to make better routing decisions. This information can be related to low-level issues, such as, node location, power required to send a message, etc., as well as, with constraints related to the application, such as, message priority, maximum delivery time, etc. In order to evaluate this approach, this thesis proposes a routing algorithm called C-AODV. As the name suggests, it is based on the ADOV algorithm, however it is modified in several aspects; in particular, the possibility of using information collected from the context can be utilized to improve message routing. In order to test the proposed solution, several tests were performed on the NS-3 simulator which allowed the evaluation of the algorithm functionalities. The tests performed indicate that the proposed solution is valid