Designing an IoT network with an emphasis on energy efficiency, utilizing a routing protocol

Abstract

In the last few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has proved to be an interesting and promising paradigm that aims to contribute to countless applications by connecting more physical “things” to the Internet. Although it emerged as a major enabler for many next generation applications, it also introduced new challenges to already saturated networks. The IoT is already coming to life especially in healthcare and smart environment applications adding a large number of low powered sensors and actuators to improve life style and introduce new services to the community. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed RPL as the routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (LLNs) and standardized it in RFC6550 in 2012. RPL quickly gained interest and many research papers were introduced to evaluate and improve its performance in different applications. In this paper, we present a discussion of the main aspects of RPL IoT applications. In recent years, the advances in sensing and communication technologies have led to the rapid development of various applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). The devices in IoT form an autonomous network architecture, in which the device has a limited battery power and the link has a low reliability. This kind of network is called the low-power and lossy network. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks. The proposed protocol introduces a novel rank value to construct a proper destination-oriented directed acyclic graph for the source node to transmit packets to the destination node. The proposed rank value is mainly derived from the expected transmission count,. Moreover, we consider the residual energy as the metric for a node to select the proper node to relay the packet to the destination node. We conducted simulations for performance evaluation, showing that the proposed routing protocol improves the packet delivery ratio, especially for the environment with a high bit error rate. The result also validated that our approach achieves the balance of energy consumption of nodes, compared to the existing approach