Context-Aware RPL-Based Mobile Crowd Sensing and Routing Protocol for Smart City Networks

Several smart city monitoring applications use Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) technology to collect surrounding data events and send them to a central location for analysis. However, the majority of these applications use infrastructure networks that use direct communication (LTE, 5G) to transfer these data to the remote server. This leads to an increase in the load of the network bandwidth and comes at a higher data cost as well. This paper proposes an infrastructure-less routing protocol for MCS based on RPL (Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks). However, RPL does not support mobility, and therefore, the proposed protocol is context-aware that adapts to the status and mobility of the nodes. The conducted performance evaluation reveals that the protocol performs better than the RPL in terms of packet delivery ratio (22% higher) and power consumption, due to the mobility management and the reduction in the control packet overhead (60% in low-medium mobility).