A multi-criteria aware integrated decision making routing protocol for IoT communication toward 6G networks

Energy resource limitations, data packet traffic congestion, mobility, and communication link failure of relay nodes are vital challenges in establishing a reliable and efficient path between end-to-end users in IoT Communication toward 6G. These factors can severely affect routing and network performance. Hence, it is imperative to design a routing approach to adapt to such heterogeneity to improve the quality of service (QoS) performance toward 6G networks. This paper proposes a multi-criteria-aware integrated decision-making (MCAIDeM) routing protocol in which relay nodes’ residual energy, queue length, mobility, and link quality are integrated into a single routing approach for efficient and reliable route selection. In particular, the MCAIDeM routing protocol utilizes an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach for multi-criteria decision-making, which determines appropriate weights according to the parameter values of the nodes to select suitable relay nodes during the route selection process. Extensive simulations are performed to evaluate the performance, and the obtained simulation results showed that the proposed MCAIDeM routing protocol outperforms conventional routing protocols in terms of network throughput, latency, and energy consumption with various network parameters. The end-to-end delay obtained by MCAIDeM was 9.03% and 11.26% lower than that of MBMQA, 11.21%, and 13.67% lower than that of MEQSA-OLSRv2, and 19.15% and 16.61% lower than that of the MP-OLSRv2 routing protocols when the node speed increased from 5 m/s to 30 m/s, respectively.