Transient Multipath routing protocol for low power and lossy networks

Abstract

RPL routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recommended IPv6 based protocol for routing over Low power Lossy Networks (LLNs). RPL is proposed for networks with characteristics like small packet size, low bandwidth, low data rate, lossy wireless links and low power. RPL is a proactive routing protocol that creates a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of the network topology. RPL is increasingly used for Internet of Things (IoT) which comprises of heterogeneous networks and applications. RPL proposes a single path routing strategy. The forwarding technique of RPL does not support multiple paths between source and destination. Multipath routing is an important strategy used in both sensor and ad-hoc network for performance enhancement. Multipath routing is also used to achieve multi-fold objectives including higher reliability, increase in throughput, fault tolerance, congestion mitigation and hole avoidance. In this paper, M-RPL (Multi-path extension of RPL) is proposed, which aims to provide temporary multiple paths during congestion over a single routing path. Congestion is primarily detected using buffer size and packet delivery ratio at forwarding nodes. Congestion is mitigated by creating partially disjoint multiple paths and by avoiding forwarding of packets through the congested node. Detailed simulation analysis of M-RPL against RPL in both grid and random topologies shows that M-RPL successfully mitigates congestion and it enhances overall network throughput.