Assessing Self-Adapting Routing Algorithm in an Industrial IoT Environment

An important application domain for the Internet of Things (IoT) is the area of industry and manufacturing where the production may be spread in different sites and hostile environments, even geographically. This paper studies an industrial application where nodes, not necessarily Internet connected, must forward their data to an IoT gateway in a multi/hop fashion adopting a swarm intelligence-based routing algorithm. In order to deal with the issues raised by the industrial domain, a mobile gateway-sink is adopted.The reliability of the communication system is investigated by a case study on a factory taken as example. A Markovian Agent Model is developed, demonstrating the effectiveness of the swarm intelligent routing protocol coupled with the mobile sink, especially when resource constrained devices (e.g. battery powered) or particularly stressing conditions (e.g. shocks, fatigue) have to be considered. Preliminary experiments show that the proposed solution is quite effective in ensuring high communication reliability in such industrial contexts.