EKF-MRPL: Advanced mobility support routing protocol for internet of mobile things: Movement prediction approach

Abstract Mobility and resources optimized management are still open challenging issues for the success and proliferation of the Internet of mobile things based on the 6LowPAN technology. An efficient mobility support protocol provides a continuous seamless connectivity for mobile nodes with constrained resources essentially in terms of energy and link capacity. The existing routing protocol RPL has a very low reactivity to mobility making it inefficient and open to further research improvements. In this paper, we propose a new proactive mobility support protocol named EKF-MRPL based on the Extended Kalman Filter and the RPL standard. The crux of this protocol consists in providing mobile nodes with a seamless connectivity while reducing the number of switching between attachment points to reduce the signaling overhead as well as the power consumption. In the quest to forecast the new point of attachment of a mobile node, we propose to predict its non-linear trajectory based on the Extended Kalman Filter. We set up an analytical model and conducted extensive simulations using the Contiki platform. Simulation results clearly show that our proposed protocol EKF-MRPL outperforms several recent proposals, in particular the EC-MRPL in terms of signaling cost, energy consumption, packet delivery ratio and handover delay.