SC-RPL: A Social Cognitive Routing for Communications in Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is regarded as the basis of the future industrial system. The interaction between nodes in IIoT shows strong regularity or sociality, which has the potential to improve the efficiency of IIoT. This article focuses on the investigation of the relationship of social activity and data transmission, and proposes a novel routing protocol to enhance QoS of social and cognitive IIoT networks. In accordance with practical requirements of an application, the routing protocol owns two purposes: one is to meet the requirement of delay-sensitive information transmission, and the other focuses on the load balance of the social and cognitive IIoT network. As a special feature of social and cognitive IIoT, the mechanism for protection of social activities is proposed while data transmission is adopted in the proposed protocol. System-level evaluation shows that the proposed protocol can achieve better performances compared with existing routing protocols for social and cognitive IIoT networks.