Two Solutions for Unnecessary Path Update Problem in Multi-Sink Based IoT Networks

Abstract

Recently, as interest in IoT (Internet of Things) increase, research and standardization of a new protocol which reflects the characteristics of IoT has progressed. Among them, RPL(IPv6 for Low-Power Lossy Network) is a standardized routing protocol for IoT. RPL utilizes DIO (DODAG Information Object) messages which is flooded from the sink node to the whole network for path establish and maintenance. However, in large scale networks, not only a long time is required to propagate the DIO message to the whole networks but also a bottleneck effect around the sink node is occurred. Multi-sink based approaches which take advantage of reducing routing overhead and bottleneck effect are widely used to solve these problems. In this paper, we define 'unnecessary path update problems' that may arise when applying the RPL protocol to the multi sink based IoT networks and propose two methods namely Routing Metric based Path Update Decision method and Immediate Successor based Path Update Decision method for selective routing update.