Abstract
The increasing number of devices in the Internet of things (IoT) is beginning to exhaust the wireless channel. As an alternative, power line communication (PLC) appears promising and has the potential of providing easy deployment at low cost. On one hand, PLC resembles wireless low-power and lossy networks (LLN). Its performance is time-varying and sensitive to noise, interference, and asymmetry owing to coexisting electronic appliances. However, when running the standard IPv6 routing protocol for LLN (RPL) on PLC, the network suffers significant reliability loss because RPL does not reflect the unique characteristics of PLC. To address this problem, we propose PLC-OF, an objective function (OF) for RPL over PLC. PLC-OF exploits PLC's physical layer (PHY) diversity as a routing metric distinct from other approaches in wireless. PLC-OF finds the most suitable path to prepare for sudden interference or congestion in power lines. Evaluation results from real testbed experiments show that PLC-OF better tolerates noisy medium compared to existing objective functions. Particularly, PLC-OF has better reliability (≈10%) and robustness with less channel usage (≈30%) than that of ETX-based MRHOF in highly congested environments.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
