A greedy model with small world for improving the robustness of heterogeneous Internet of Things

Robustness is an important and challenging issue in the Internet of Things (IoT), which contains multiple types of heterogeneous networks. Improving the robustness of topological structure, i.e., withstanding a certain amount of node failures, is of great significance especially for the energy-limited lightweight networks. Meanwhile, a high-performance topology is also necessary. The small world model has been proven to be a feasible way to optimize the network topology. In this paper, we propose a Greedy Model with Small World properties (GMSW) for heterogeneous sensor networks in IoT. We first present the two greedy criteria used in GMSW to distinguish the importance of different network nodes, based on which we define the concept of local importance of nodes. Then, we present our algorithm that transforms a network to possess small world properties by adding shortcuts between certain nodes according to their local importance. Our performance evaluations demonstrate that, by only adding a small number of shortcuts, GMSW can quickly enable a network to exhibit the small world properties. We also compare GMSW with a latest related work, the Directed Angulation toward the Sink Node Model (DASM), showing that GMSW outperforms DASM in terms of small world characteristics and network latency.