CoAR: Congestion-Aware Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks for IoT Applications

The IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) was designed to satisfy the requirements of a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, including industrial and environmental monitoring. In most scenarios, different from an ordinary environment, the industrial monitoring system under emergency scenarios needs to not only periodically collect the information from the sensing region, but also respond rapidly to some unusual situations. In the monitoring system, particularly when an event occurs in the sensing region, a surge of data generated by the sensors may lead to congestion at parent node as data packets converge towards the root. Congestion problem degrades the network performance that has an impact on quality of service. To resolve this problem, we propose a congestion-aware routing protocol (CoAR) which utilizes the selection of an alternative parent to alleviate the congestion in the network. The proposed mechanism uses a multi-criteria decision-making approach to select the best alternative parent node within the congestion by combining the multiple routing metrics. Moreover, the neighborhood index is used as the tie-breaking metric during the parent selection process when the routing score is equal. In order to determine the congestion, CoAR adopts the adaptive congestion detection mechanism based on the current queue occupancy and observation of present and past traffic trends. The proposed protocol has been tested and evaluated in different scenarios in comparison with ECRM and RPL. The simulation results show that CoAR is capable of dealing successfully with congestion in LLNs while preserving the required characteristics of the IoT applications.