# Context-Aware Gossip-Based Protocol for Internet of Things Applications
## 7 Conclusions and Future Work  
This paper proposed a flexible context-aware variant of the gossiping routing protocol for utilisation in WSNs. The new protocol uses an MFWF to enable effective communication among resource-constrained sensors. This MFWF considers several parameters that impact the performance of an IoT network or WSN; these parameters include the residual energy, the distances to the next node and to the sink, the neighbour density, and the message priority. The effects of these parameters on several performance measures were examined to assist in the selection of the most relevant parameters or combinations of parameters for three types of IoT applications (critical, bandwidth-intensive, and energy-efficient). This resulted in three tailored MFWFs, one for each of the application categories (see Equations (10)-(12)).The performances of these three MFWFs were then comparatively assessed against those of the traditional gossiping and FELGossiping [19] protocols and summarised in Table 5. Both critical and bandwidth-intensive MFWFs proved proficient for critical IoT applications, as it took the least delay to reach its destination at varying network scales. For energy-efficient IoT applications, both the energy-efficient MFWF and critical MFWF demonstrated their capability of improving the network lifetime. In the case of bandwidth-intensive IoT applications, three protocols proved equally applicable: critical MFWF, bandwidth-intensive MFWF, and FELGossiping.  
Several limitations of the proposed protocol lend themselves to future work. For instance, in this paper, the weighting factors were set only to either 0 or 1; however, considering the possibility of using fractional numbers between 0 and 1 will be valuable. Also, exploring other new parameters and factors to include in the proposed function can make the proposed protocol more adaptive to the requirements of different IoT applications. Additionally, the MFWF parameters were examined in isolation from each other; therefore, the effect of the parameters on each other was not considered  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c} \hline \hline  & & \multicolumn{3}{c}{**IoT Applications**} \\  & **Critical** & **Energy-Efficient** & **Bandwidth-Intensive** \\ \hline Traditional gossiping & & & \\ FELGossiping & & & ✓ \\ Critical MFWF & ✓ & ✓ & ✓ \\ Energy-efficient MFWF & & ✓ & \\ Bandwidth-intensive MFWF & ✓ & & ✓ \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 5: The suitability of the five protocols (traditional gossiping, FELGossiping, critical MFWF, energy-efficient MFWF, and bandwidth-intensive MFWF) for three categories of IoT applications: critical, bandwidth-intensive, and energy-efficient.  
experimentally. In the future, this effect will be studied between two or more parameters to better inform the construction of the MFWFs for various IoT applications. Moreover, the overhead caused by message exchanging among nodes will be eliminated by transmitting only neighbouring node's information that has been changed. The three IoT application discussed in this paper, were considered separately and it would be valuable to study the effect of a mixed traffic IoT and its impact on their performances. Finally, a more thorough investigation of the proposed algorithm will be considered to comparatively assess its performance against other gossip variants and popular IoT protocols.  
Conceptualization, H.K., L.A. and A.A.; Methodology, L.A. and A.A.; Software, A.A.; Formal Analysis, L.A. and A.A.; Investigation, L.A. and A.A.; Writing--Original Draft Preparation, S.A.-M.; Writing--Review & Editing, H.K., L.A., S.A.-M., G.-A.-H., and K.Y.-T.; Visualization, S.A.-M.; Validation, H.K., G.A.-H., and K.Y.-T.; Supervision, H.K. and K.Y.-T. Funding Acquisition, H.K.  
The authors would like to thank the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University for funding this work through research group no. RG-1438-002.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.