Improved Trickle Algorithm for Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks

Abstract

Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is designed in order to avoid the routing issues in wireless sensor networks due to limited energy of nodes, link failures, and so on. RPL constructs the destination oriented directed acyclic graph (DODAG) out of the physical network by using various constraints, such as different routing metrics, objective functions, and so on. The trickle timer in RPL is used to reduce the control traffic overhead by dividing the time into intervals. It increases its sending rate of the control messages if an inconsistency is detected to resolve it quickly otherwise it decreases its sending rate by exponentially increasing its window size. The trickle-F algorithm solves the load balancing problem by implementing the fair broadcast suppression mechanism. Our proposed improved-trickle algorithm sets the redundancy counter to zero not at the beginning of new interval but at the time of suppression or transmission of the DODAG information object message in the trickle-F algorithm to solve the load balancing problem and to reduce the energy and power consumption by taking into consideration the messages heard from time t to the end of the interval.