The importance of nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms in the data routing and path finding problem in the internet of things

Over the last decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become ever more popular, as is evident from its role in changing the human lifestyle and conferring remarkable privileges for them. It has a significant presence in various crucial areas, including smart cities, smart factories, manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare. Massive amounts of data generated by IoT devices have the potential to endanger the lifetime of nodes in IoT-based networks due to increased communication power consumption. It has become crucial to propose solutions for network-based issues, such as quality of service, security, network heterogeneity, congestion avoidance, reliable routing, and energy conservation. To address the mentioned problems, routing protocols play a critical role in data transmission among heterogeneous items. In such environments, routing refers to constructing routes between mobile nodes. Since identifying optimal routes among IoT nodes and establishing an effective routing protocol in an IoT network are an NP-hard issue, employing metaheuristic algorithms may be a viable solution to overcome this problem. Various IoT routing protocols based on metaheuristic algorithms have been presented in recent years, but there is still a lack of systematic study for reviewing the existing works. The current study emphasizes the impact of metaheuristic algorithms in the IoT routing problem, discusses the optimization models, presents a comprehensive comparison of protocols based on critical parameters, and eventually suggests some hints for future studies.