An improved AODV routing for the zigbee heterogeneous networks in 5G environment

A modified AODV Junior routing protocol is adopted as part of the combined routing strategy in the ZigBee networks. However, its routing overhead caused by the routing discovery and the routing table maintenance needs to be further reduced. Considering the deploying environment, the emerging 5G technology tends to be ubiquitous in the near future. Due to its native support to the smart devices and the M2M communication, the 5G terminals may be used as gateways for the ZigBee networks to improve the existing routing method. The ZigBee coordinator and the 5G terminals, which both have the accessibility to the internet, are defined as associated gateways (AG). Aiming to the higher efficiency and the shorter path, an improved ZigBee AODV (Z-AODV) routing protocol using associated gateways for the heterogeneous networks in the 5G environment is proposed in this paper. Besides the regular ZigBee function, by sharing the neighbour and routing information via IP network, the AGs are also responsible for collaboratively finding the optimum path and transmitting the packets to reduce the consumption for ZigBee devices. Moreover, an additional routing information collecting method is developed to further improve the routing performance. The proposed algorithm is evaluated based on simulation results. It is shown that our routing method outperforms the existing ones by higher picketer deliver ratio, shorter path length, lower latency, fewer packets sent per ZigBee node and lower routing overhead.