Design a New Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks Environments

Abstract

Nowadays, low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) are one of the most exciting fields of study. LLNs include, Power Line Communication (PLC) networks, Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) and IoT networks. The IPV6 routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL) is the standard protocol of the IoT networks. The IETF defines two types of RPL objective functions, MRHOF and OF0. Both MRHOF and OF0 suffer from long hops when selecting the routs to the sink because they select the route depending on one metric that cause selecting inefficient routes and unbalanced parent chosen that make the problem of bottleneck nodes that causes more network delay and high packet loss ratio because of the high congestion nodes, especially the nodes that located near to the sink node. Because these nodes are battery powered, extending the network lifetime is important matter. We suggested an improvement RPL objective function that considers three metrics (load, residual energy, and ETX metrics) instead of only one metric. We discussed the related work, defined the proposed protocol model to enhance the RPL protocol, The simulation results are evaluated by tacking different network topologies and we compared the performance of the proposed protocol with the performance of the MRHOF under different TX/RX ratios. The results show that the proposed protocol increases the network lifetime by reducing energy consumption, increasing efficiency, increasing PDR. The best performance is with Tx/Rx equal to 100/100, because the high Tx/Rx means high link quality. The objective function that takes only one metric is not sufficient and the objective function that takes more than one metric into account is more accurate and efficient when selecting the routs to sink node, because the efficient routes decrease the probability of congestion, and decrease the network delay by making the network more stable.