Improved energy efficient load balanced mobility management RPL protocol for mobile internet of things networks

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Networking
• Internet of Things (IoT)

Background:

• The Internet of Things (IoT) faces challenges with heterogeneous traffic from static and mobile sensors.
• The default routing protocol for low-power lossy networks (RPL) struggles to support mobility in IoT applications.
• Existing solutions for mobile IoT (MIoT) applications leave an open research gap.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel mobility-aware queue and workload-based routing protocol (MQW-RPL) for enhanced IoT performance.
• To address the limitations of existing RPL protocols in dynamic, mobile IoT environments.
• To improve network lifetime and overall performance in heterogeneous traffic networks.

Main Methods:

• MQW-RPL computes a reliable preferred parent rank using current buffer and workload traffic of one-hop neighbors.
• A multi-metric approach, including Expected Transmission Count (ETX), energy, and Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), is adopted to support mobility and smooth handoffs.
• Backward compatibility is ensured by incorporating an additional flag bit without altering the existing standard.

Main Results:

• MQW-RPL significantly outperforms existing protocols (ERPL, mRPL, S-RPL) in Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), minimum delay, energy efficiency, and packet overhead.
• The proposed protocol demonstrates faster convergence time in heterogeneous networks.
• Average performance improvements include 13.5% over ERPL, 15.7% over mRPL, and 21.5% over S-RPL.

Conclusions:

• MQW-RPL effectively enhances the performance of IoT networks, particularly in scenarios with mobile sensors.
• The protocol offers a robust solution for managing heterogeneous traffic and ensuring smooth handoffs.
• MQW-RPL provides backward compatibility, making it suitable for both static and mobile IoT environments.