Improving network lifetime and reliability for machine type communications based on LOADng routing protocol

Abstract

With the advent of machine type communication (MTC) as part of the Internet of Things (IoT), there is an increasing need to address the challenges for the machine to machine (M2M) communications. Among the two routing protocols specifically designed for low-power lossy networks, RPL has limited support for M2M communications; whereas, LOADng can address the resource constraints of the nodes and demands for M2M communication. This paper proposes a new composite routing metric, LRRE, for LOADng to address the node congestion due to heavy traffic through the node and early node death. The LOADng with LRRE is implemented in ns-3 simulator. The simulation results show improved performance of LOADng with LRRE compared to that with the traditional hop count and residual energy metrics. We also propose a new multipath data forwarding scheme, namely, weighted forwarding (WF) to distribute the load evenly across the network. We extend the ns-3 simulation module for LOADng to multipath routing and integrate it with the newly proposed routing metric and multipath data forwarding technique. The simulation results show a significant improvement in network lifetime, packet delivery ratio, and energy utilization with the proposed LRRE metric and WF multipath data forwarding scheme. Analytical results are also obtained for simplified cases.