Downward traffic retransmission mechanism for improving reliability in RPL environment supporting mobility

Abstract

With the diversification of industrial Internet of Things applications, there is a growing demand for mobility support in industrial wireless networking environments. However, the routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks is designed based on a static environment and is vulnerable in a mobility environment. Routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks is an Internet engineering task force standard in the low-power and lossy network environments used mainly in industrial environments. In addition, although routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks is based on collection tree protocol and is suitable for data collection and upward traffic transmission, it struggles with downward traffic transmission in terms of control, actuation, and end-to-end transmission. In this article, the problems caused by mobile nodes in routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks are discussed, and a retransmission scheme named IM-RPL is proposed. This retransmission scheme can improve the performance of downward traffic for the mobile nodes by retransmitting the packets to the neighbor nodes, the mobile node’s new parent sets, and relaying them to the mobile node. Its performance is evaluated through an experiment. The results demonstrate that using OpenMote in OpenWSN’s time slotted channel hopping induces a packet reception ratio improvement and a lower transmission delay as compared to standard routing protocol for low power and lossy.