## 1 Introduction  
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a wide concept that has attracted attention from the research community in recent years [1]. The term IoT can be used to describe a pervasive and ubiquitous network in which devices exchange information between each other without the requirement for human intervention [2]. This network can be used by applications of a wide variety and with varying objectives, such as smart homes and cities [3], industrial automation [4], smart markets [5], and healthcare systems [6, 7]. However, at the same time, the IoT has captured the attention of the business world and society. IoT concepts give rise to several technical challenges that limit its broad adoption. IoT devices form, in general, a low power and lossy network (LLN), composed of many nodes with strong restrictions on memory, processing capacity, and, in some cases, energy. Depending on the application, the nodes in an IoT network can have different hardware capacities and application objectives. In the IoT scenario presented in Figure 1, some network nodes can have a direct Internet connection to send and receive messages from the Internet. In contrast, other nodes from the same network, due to hardware limitations, cannot have a direct Internet connection and require the use of the Internet-connected nodes to access external services. All of these nodes can also exchange information in a local context without the necessity of transmitting data to the Internet. The task of discovering the routes and allowing data messages to be exchanged among nodes is performed by the routing protocol. Thus, in an LLN, the network performance is strongly related to how the routing protocols use the limited hardware resources of the network devices. In the context of low-power IoT networks, the routing protocols can be grouped into two types based on the route creation principles: proactive and reactive [8]. Proactive protocols begin the creation of routes among the nodes without the prior necessity of data message transmission. The route creation process is, in general, triggered by gateway nodes that have the function of collecting information from other network devices (multipoint-to-point (MP2P) traffic). For this reason, this type of protocol is widely adopted by periodical data collection applications. The main example of a proactive routing protocol for LLNs is the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) [9]. In contrast, reactive protocols create routes only when a node intends to send a message to a destination. Thus, the route discovery process is triggered by the node that wants the message. The created routes are maintained in the routing table of the nodes, remaining while in use and removed afterwards. Hence, this type of protocol is indicated for non-periodical traffic application, where any node can send messages to any other (point-to-point (P2P) traffic). The current and most relevant reactive protocol for LLN is LOADng [10]. This work is focused on IoT applications where the traffic pattern is variable, the network devices have different capacities, and the communication among the devices is, mainly, P2P (as exemplified in Figure 1). Thus, considering that reactive protocols are the most appropriate for this type of scenario, LOADng will be used as a basis to the design the proposed solution. The protocol is currently under consideration by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to become a defined standard. LOADng is in its fifteenth draft and has undergone several modifications since its initial proposal in October 2011 [11]. Thus, the most recent version will be used in this work. A short but comprehensive description of LOADng is presented in Section 3. Although it uses the most indicated route creation principles in the IoT scenario considered in this study, LOADng can present several problems such as the necessity of previous and static definitions of the nodes responsible for providing the Internet connection to other network devices.