Path Reecovery in 6LoWPAN Routing Protocol

Abstract

6LoWPAN has become a new technology to provide the Internet connectivity to the traditional wireless sensor network (WSN). In order to route the delivered packet from originator to destination nodes, the simplified Ad-hoc On- Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol for 6LoWPAN with 6LoWPAN Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (LOAD) has been introduced. However, the conceptual LOAD routing protocol has yet proposed any path recovery mechanism in 6LoWPAN. In this paper, an originator recognition (OR) path recovery mechanism is proposed for the 6LoWPAN LOAD-based routing protocol. In this proposed mechanism, the participated nodes will memorize the originator address attached within data packet during the data transmission. When a link break happens on destination path, the LOAD protocol message will be amended by inserting an identity key, which is a memorial of originator address, in the generated route error (RERR) message before transmitted towards the originator for the failure notification. This identity key is then used by the originator to initialize path recovery in order to retransmit the failed data packet to the unreachable destination node. Instead of using MAC address in the LOAD routing protocol, IP address is used in the proposed Originator Recognition (OR) path recovery mechanism (OR-LOAD) routing protocol which is designed for the global routing. The proposed OR-LOAD routing protocol has been examined under noisy 6LoWPAN environment in Qualnet simulator. Its performance is then evaluated and compared to AODV routing protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio and average energy consumption. The simulation results show that the proposed OR-LOAD outperforms AODV with packet delivery ratio of 19.4%, and with comparable average energy consumption in both routing protocols.