Routing with Energy Threshold for WSN-IoT Based on RPL Protocol

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) enables things to have connectivity through the internet. The number of things is growing fast and has to be uniquely identified through the Internet to communicate with other things. In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) each node can be considered as a thing. WSN node resources are very limited due to the need to communicate using low power and usually through unreliable links. Such limitations need an energy efficient routing protocol. WSN is considered as a type of Low power and Lossy Network (LLN). The routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL) is being adopted for LLN and has been standardized to enable connectivity of WSN over IoT. RPL constricted a topology similar to tree topology. Nodes in RPL optimized its path using an objective function (OF). OF depends on different node/link metrics in the optimization process. In this paper, an Energy Threshold RPL (ETRPL) protocol is proposed. ETRPL depends on a new objective function to enhance energy consumption of RPL protocol by taking into account the remaining energy of the preferred parent node. ETRPL is implemented using Cooja simulator. The results show that ETRPL provides an increase in the remaining energy of at least 87.4% for a small area with high number of nodes. ETRPL also performed better with regards to Time Delay, Packet Reception Ratio, and the number of dead nodes in a small area. For a large area, the performance is not encouraging. Thus the proposed ETRPL protocol is useful for IoT networks with relatively small areas.