Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 3173: An Enhanced Distributed Data Aggregation Method in the Internet of Things (Sensors)

“Internet of Things (IoT)” has emerged as a novel concept in the world of technology and communication. In modern network technologies, the capability of transmitting data through data communication networks (such as Internet or intranet) is provided for each organism (e.g. human beings, animals, things, and so forth). Due to the limited hardware and operational communication capability as well as small dimensions, IoT undergoes several challenges. Such inherent challenges not only cause fundamental restrictions in the efficiency of aggregation, transmission, and communication between nodes; but they also degrade routing performance. To cope with the reduced availability time and unstable communications among nodes, data aggregation, and transmission approaches in such networks are designed more intelligently. In this paper, a distributed method is proposed to set child balance among nodes. In this method, the height of the network graph increased through restricting the degree; and network congestion reduced as a result. In addition, a dynamic data aggregation approach based on Learning Automata was proposed for Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LA-RPL). More specifically, each node was equipped with learning automata in order to perform data aggregation and transmissions. Simulation and experimental results indicate that the LA-RPL has better efficiency than the basic methods used in terms of energy consumption, network control overhead, end-to-end delay, loss packet and aggregation rates.