Improving the Power and EnergyCo-efficient using Load Balancing Routing Protocol in Internet ofThings

Abstract

Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is an IPv6 routing protocol that is standardized for the Internet of Things (IoT) by Internet-Engineering Task Force (IETF). RPL forms a tree-like topology which is based on different optimizing process called Objective Function (OF). In most cases, IoT has to deal with low power devices and lossy networks. So, the major constraints of the RPL are limited power source, network life time and reliability of the network. OFs depend on different metrics like Expected Transmission Count (ETX), Energy, Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) for route optimization. In this work, the ETX and Energy based OF have been evaluated in terms of energy-efficiency and reliability. For one sink and nine senders, the simulated average power consumption is 1.291 mW and 1.56 mW respectively, for ETX OF and Energy OF. On the other hand, the average hop count for ETX OF is 1.89, which is 3.01 for Energy OF. Thus, ETX OF is more energy-efficient but it is not reliable as it takes fewer hops with long distances. Moreover, it does not take load balancing and link quality into account. However, Energy OF is more reliable due to short hops, but it is not energy efficient and sometimes it might take unnecessary hops.