Increased Network Lifetime and Load Balancing Based on Network Interface Average Power Metric for RPL

Hermano Pereira,Anelise Munaretto,Guilherme Luiz Moritz,Mauro Fonseca,Richard Demo Souza

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2979834

Abstract

The technological paradigm of the Internet of Things has attracted the attention of the market, industry, and scientific community. The possibility of integrating wireless sensor network (WSN) devices to the Internet has prompted the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to specify new standards and protocols, such as the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), designed to find stable routing paths via links that have considerable losses. Among the routing metrics, the expected transmission count (ETX) is notable because its implementation in RPL helps choosing reliable paths. However, the rapid exhaustion of battery energy at bottleneck nodes remains a problem. In this context, this study introduces the network interface average power metric (NIAP), a new metric based on the estimated average power consumption of the network interface, which contributes not only to the choice of reliable paths but also to load balancing and lifetime increasing of a wireless sensor network. The results of several experiments conducted in a simulated environment demonstrate that NIAP is a promising alternative to ETX due to its simple implementation without modifications of the RPL standard.

Highlights

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless personal area networks (WPANs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received increased attention because the integration of these networks with the Internet poses new challenges, such as security, reliability, and energy efficiency
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS This section presents the results of 1800 experiments: 3 routing metrics (ETX, packet transmission rate (PTR), and network interface average power metric (NIAP)) and 60 random topologies for each network size (10-nodes to 100-nodes)
It is observed that NIAP outperformed PTR and ETX metrics, and the difference grows with network size

Summary

Introduction

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless personal area networks (WPANs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received increased attention because the integration of these networks with the Internet poses new challenges, such as security, reliability, and energy efficiency. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) refers to these networks as low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). The IoT leads to the demand for new standards and new protocols from the IETF, prompting the adaptation of the Internet Protocol (IP) to implement IPv6 over Low-power WPAN (6LoWPAN), which is. The necessity for a particular routing protocol for LLNs resulted in RFC 6550 [2], which specifies the Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL)—a routing protocol that forms directed graphs to at least one root node to obtain a stable and loop-free forwarding topology. With RPL, each node of the topology makes its choice of the parent node that provides the best path to the root node considering routing metrics and constraints. RPL enables the root node to form a bridge between LLNs and the Internet; being, a suitable routing protocol for the IoT

Methods

Results

Conclusion