Topology-Free Networking Using Implicit Coordination in Dense IoT Systems

Abstract

The traditional networking topologies of Internet of Things (IoT) systems are based on explicit topology building, neighbor discovery, and routing state maintenance. Although they are effective in less dense and stable networks, these methods are inefficient in dense, dynamic, and unstructured IoT networks because they increase the control overhead, energy usage, and scalability. This study proposes a topology-free networking paradigm that does not require topology awareness, routing tables, node identifiers, or neighbor discovery. Rather, data propagation is realized via implicit coordination of nodes as decided by locally visible cues, such as signal strength, reception timing, and channel contention. An opportunistic forwarding based on a suppression strategy is presented, in which each node calculates a forwarding score based on these normalized parameters and applies opportunistic forwarding to the node. The proposed method was evaluated through simulations under varying node densities and traffic demands. The performance is evaluated by means of several metrics, such as packet reachability, end-to-end delay, transmission redundancy, scalability, control overhead, and energy consumption. The findings indicate that the proposed topology-free approach offers reliable data delivery, with a substantially reduced overhead and high efficiency in dense IoT contexts. These results suggest the promise of topology-free networking as a scalable and energy saving alternative to large-scale and resource-constrained IoT systems in the future.