AODV Multicast Routing for the Zigbee Heterogeneous Networks in 5G Environment on Wireless Sensor Network

A modified AODV routing protocol is adopted as part of the combined routing strategy in the ZigBee networks. Considering the deploying environment, the emerging 5G technology tends to be ubiquitous in the near future. 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.