A Routing Scheme Considering Bottleneck and Route Link Quality in RPL-based IoT Wireless Networks

In order to manage a large number of devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). The route of the RPL network is generated through the use of an Objective Function (OF) that is suitable for the service that is required for the IoT network. Since the route of the RPL network is conventionally simply chosen only by considering the link quality between the nodes, it is sensible to seek an OF that can also provide better Quality of Service (QoS). In previous studies, the end-to-end delay might possibly be sub-optimal because they only deal with problems related to the reduction of energy consumption and not to the link quality on the path to the sink node. In this study, we propose a scheme that reduces the end-to-end delay but also gives full consideration to both the quality on the entire route to the destination and to the expected lifetime of nodes with bottlenecks from heaped traffic. Weighting factors for the proposed scheme are chosen by experiments and the proposed scheme can reduce the end-to-end delay and the energy consumption of previous studies by 20.8% and 10.5%, respectively.