A distributed routing protocol for sending data from things to the cloud leveraging fog technology in the large-scale IoT ecosystem

Fog computing integrates cloud and edge resources. According to an intelligent and decentralized method, this technology processes data generated by IoT sensors to seamlessly integrate physical and cyber environments. Internet of Things uses wireless and smart objects. They communicate with each other, monitor the environment, collect information, and respond to user requests. These objects have limited energy resources since they use batteries to supply energy. Also, they cannot replace their batteries. As a result, the network lifetime is limited and short. Thus, reducing energy consumption and accelerating the data transmission process are very important challenges in IoT networks to reduce the response time. In the data transmission process, selecting an appropriate cluster head node is very important because it can reduce the delay when sending data to the fog. In this paper, cluster head nodes are selected based on several important criteria such as distance, residual energy, received signal strength, and link expiration time. Then, objects send the processed data to the server hierarchically through a balanced tree. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the energy-efficient centroid-based routing protocol (EECRP) and the Emergency Response IoT based on Global Information Decision (ERGID) in terms of packet delivery rate, delay, response time, and network lifetime.