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

Abstract

The wireless sensor networks (WSN) are immersed in multiple areas of knowledge and are the alternative that allows analyzing, solving, and preventing problems under different facets. The RPL protocol (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power a Lossy Networks) arises for the management of this type of network restricted by their physical capabilities through different rules and operations that simplify the communications and constructions of the WSN. Although RPL is an efficient and standardized protocol, it does not consider high traffic handling and presents severe problems regarding load balancing, which leads to service disruption. In this article, WRF-RPL is proposed as a protocol for considering load balancing over RPL to distribute communications and messages into a network topology to avoid one preferred parent’s congestions. The proposed protocol aims to improve the network’s lifetime and the packet delivery through source nodes to the sink in an energy-efficient manner. Different simulated scenarios were conducted over the Cooja simulator. The results show that WRF-RPL protocols outperform the standard RPL protocol over Network Lifetime, PDR, control message overhead, and energy consumption compared with other existing protocols.

Keywords

• Wireless sensor networks
• routing protocols
• energy efficiency
• RPL
• load balancing
• objective functions