Improving Mean Time to Failure of IoT Networks with Reliability-Aware Routing

The unprecedented scale and ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT) introduce a maintainability challenge. IoT networks operate in diverse and harsh environments that impose nonnegligible thermal stress on the IoT devices with no active cooling. The lifetime of these networks can be limited by the exacerbated effects of hardware failure mechanisms at high temperatures, exponentially accelerating reliability degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel reliability-driven routing approach to mitigate the reliability degradation of IoT devices and improve the network Mean Time to Failure (MTTF). Through routing, we curb the utilization of highly degrading devices, which helps to lower the device power dissipation and temperature and reduce the effect of temperature-driven failure mechanisms. The routing protocol makes the decisions based on the current reliability of the devices, the amount of degradation they will experience due to communication activity, and networking performance. We enhance the ns-3 network simulator to support our reliability modeling and evaluate the routing performance by comparing with state-of-the-art approaches.