Improved routing metrics for energy constrained interconnected devices in low-power and lossy networks

Abstract

The routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) is an internet protocol based routing protocol developed and standardized by IETF in 2012 to support a wide range of applications for low-power and lossy-networks (LLNs). In LLNs consisting of resource-constrained devices, the energy consumption of battery powered sensing devices during network operations can greatly impact network lifetime. In the case of inefficient route selection, the energy depletion from even a few nodes in the network can damage network integrity and reliability by creating holes in the network. In this paper, a composite energy-aware node metric (RERBDI ) is proposed for RPL; thismetric uses both the residual energy ratio (RER) of the nodes and their battery discharge index. This composite metric helps avoid overburdening power depleted network nodes during packet routing from the source towards the destination oriented directed acyclic graph root node. Additionally, an objective function is defined for RPL, which combines the node metric RERBDI and the expected transmission count (ETX) link quality metric; this helps to improve the overall network packet delivery ratio. The COOJA simulator is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The simulations show encouraging results for the proposed scheme in terms of network lifetime, packet delivery ratio and energy consumption, when compared to the most popular schemes for RPL like ETX, hop-count and RER.