The evolution of Smart City projects is pushing researchers and companies to develop more efficient embedded hardware and also more efficient communication technologies. These communication technologies are the focus of this work, presenting a new routing algorithm based on dynamically-allocated sub-networks and node roles. Among these features, our algorithm presents a fast set-up time, a reduced overhead and a hierarchical organization, which allows for the application of complex management techniques. This work presents a routing algorithm based on a dynamically-allocated hierarchical clustering, which uses the link quality indicator as a reference parameter, maximizing the network coverage and minimizing the control message overhead and the convergence time. The present work based its test scenario and analysis in the density measure, considered as a node degree. The routing algorithm is compared with some of the most well known routing algorithms for different scenario densities.

Smart Cities are called to change the daily life of human beings. This concept permits improving the efficiency of our cities in several areas such as the use of water, energy consumption, waste treatment, and mobility both for people as well as vehicles throughout the city. This represents an interconnected scenario in which thousands of embedded devices need to work in a collaborative way both for sensing and modifying the environment properly. Under this scenario, the majority of devices will use wireless protocols for communicating among them, representing a challenge for optimizing the use of the electromagnetic spectrum. When the density of deployed nodes increases, the competition for using the physical medium becomes harder and, in consequence, traffic collisions will be higher, affecting data-rates in the communication process. This work presents mDARAL, a multi-radio routing algorithm based on the Dynamic and Adaptive Radio Algorithm (DARAL), which has the capability of isolating groups of nodes into sub-networks. The nodes of each sub-network will communicate among them using a dedicated radio frequency, thus isolating the use of the radio channel to a reduced number of nodes. Each sub-network will have a master node with two physical radios, one for communicating with its neighbours and the other for being the contact point among its group and other sub-networks. The communication among sub-networks is done through master nodes in a dedicated radio frequency. The algorithm works to maximize the overall performance of the network through the distribution of the traffic messages into unoccupied frequencies. The obtained results show that mDARAL achieves great improvement in terms of the number of control messages necessary to connect a node to the network, convergence time and energy consumption during the connection phase compared to DARAL.

The dynamic and adaptive radio protocol (DARP) is a new protocol proposal with some interesting features such as dynamic roles and the use of virtual sub‐networks. The wireless sensor network state of art is discussed and some desirable features are presented in order to adapt these networks to new scenarios. These necessities are quite important to expand the applicability of wireless sensor networks and for this reason the DARP is proposed.

The present work analyses the wireless sensor network protocol (DARP) and the impact of different configuration parameter sets on its performance. Different scenarios have been considered, in order to gain a better understanding of the influence of the configuration on network protocols. The developed statistical analysis is based on the method known as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), which focuses on the effect of the configuration on the performance of DARP. Three main dependent variables were considered: number of control messages sent during the set-up time, energy consumption and convergence time. A total of 20,413 simulations were carried out to ensure greater robustness in the statistical conclusions. The main goal of this work is to discover the most critical configuration parameters for the protocol, with a view to potential applications in Smart City type scenarios.