EHA-RPL: A Composite Routing Technique in IoT Application Networks

Abstract

IoT solutions are based on low power and lossy networks (LLNs). LLN network consists of nodes having limited processing power, memory and battery capacity. The Routing Over Low Power And Lossy Networks (ROLL) group have developed an RPL protocol for LLN. To fulfil the QoS requirements for different applications, the RPL needs to be optimized and the resources have to be utilized efficiently. The RPL protocol uses an objective function that helps to calculate the rank of a node and select an optimized parent through which data is forwarded. The single routing metric used by RPL does not satisfy all the QoS requirements. So, we have proposed a new composite routing technique called EHA-RPL which combines three routing metrics, i.e. Expected Transmission Count (ETX), hop count and available energy using two approaches, namely lexicographic and additive approach. It is observed that our approach shows better performance in terms of energy consumption, network latency and packet delivery ratio as compared to the traditional approaches.