Routing in IoT Lossy Networks: Potential Issues and Proposed Changes

Abstract

The specificities of the Internet of Things (IoT) require innovative methods to perform routing, owing to the resource limitations of network nodes. The IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks ( RPL), as one of these pioneering methods, performs a variety of routing measurements to meet the requirements of some IoT applications, but, does not solve the problems of sudden and intense data traffic caused by the particularity of the other ones. Indeed, it has been observed that such unexpected and excessive data traffic leads to routing instability and traffic congestion in the IoT network. In order to overcome the mentioned shortcomings, we propose a common solution using the mobility of some nodes to reduce system instability and alleviate congestion on the network, to be named: use of mobile node for the Instability & Congestion Alleviation in IoT networks (mob-ICA). Therefore, our contribution consists in overcoming network instability by dynamically regulating the message transmission period to choose the parent nodes according to the speed and direction of the mobile nodes and in reducing congestion by using these nodes to locally create alternative paths to the parental node