Energy Efficiency in Low power and Lossy Networks

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Energy efficiency is an important consideration in designing routing protocols particularly in Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLN). The design of any energy-efficient routing protocol must show significant reduction in energy consumption without compromising the performance or operations of the underlined protocol. The two default routing protocols defined by the Routing over Low Power and Lossy (ROLL) Networking Group were developed for static networks, which utilizes only hop-count and expected transmission count metric for making routing decisions in the network. Internet of Things grows rapidly thereby connecting devices that are much smaller and sophisticated in different areas of life. We have shown that the default IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) lacks the capacity to cope with this growth. Consequently, we proposed a more encompassing routing protocol that takes into consideration different routing metrics and different situations in making routing decisions. Our protocol uses Link quality and Residual energy metrics in addition to the expected transmission count to determine the most optimal route and preferred parent in selection of routes. Simulation results indicate a significant improvement in energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay of 35%, 15%, and 23% respectively when compared with default routing protocols. We also successfully implemented our protocol in a mobile scenario.