A New Load-Balancing Aware Objective Function for RPL's IoT Networks

Abstract

The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL) has been recently standardized as the de facto solution for routing in the context of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. RPL, along with other standards, has provided a baseline framework for IoT that has helped advance communications in the world of embedded resource-constrained networks. However, RPL still suffers from issues that may limit its efficiency such as the absence of an efficient load-balancing primitive. In this study, we show how RPL suffers from a loadbalancing problem that may harm both the reliability of the protocol and its network lifetime. To address this problem, a novel load-balancing scheme is introduced that significantly enhances the reliability of RPL and fosters the protocol's efficiency in terms of power consumption.

WRF-RPL: Weighted Random Forward RPL for High Traffic and Energy Demanding Scenarios

“…Therefore, it considers allowing to have the possibility of choosing different candidate parents for the distribution. In [17], the "Child count" metric is employed by sharing such information through DIO messages. However, since the sending of the DIO message may vary between different time intervals, the authors propose a modification to the Trickle timer mechanism, in charge of the periodicity of DIO sending, by adding the so-called FastPropagationTimer.…”

“…Therefore, there are deficiencies when situations arise that require load distribution or when facing a scenario with a high data flow. These deficiencies lead to an exponential increase in data loss caused by buffer overloads at the nodes and an increase in the energy consumption of the affected nodes [17]. These congestions underlying the load maldistribution cause subnets' formation not connected to the sink because the blocked nodes (bottlenecks) considerably reduce the success rate of packet retransmission.…”

Reinforcement Learning-Enabled Cross-Layer Optimization for Low-Power and Lossy Networks under Heterogeneous Traffic Patterns

“…It shows improvement in the network throughput but increases overall energy consumption. Ghaleb et al [37] proposed a solution to balance the load by monitoring the list of child nodes and also introduced a fast propagation timer to update the child list. The proposed method improves the packet delivery ratio and energy consumption, but it presents a looping in the network which increases the convergence time.…”

DCRL‐RPL: Dual context‐based routing and load balancing in RPL for IoT networks

“…Ghaleb et al [36] have contributed the load balancing metric aware objective function (LBOF) in RPL-based IoT network. Here, the child count metric was considered to balance the load among the multiple parent nodes in the network.…”