Volume 15, Number 3

Congestion and Energy Aware Multipath Load Balancing Routing for LLNs

  Authors

Kala Venugopal and T G Basavaraju, Government Engineering College, India

  Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is presently in its golden era with its current technological evolution towards digital transformation. Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) form the groundwork for IoT, where the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is designated by Internet Engineering Task Force as the benchmark protocol for routing. Although RPL, with its unique capabilities, has addressed many IoT routing requirements, Load balancing and Congestion control are the outliers. This paper builds on the RPL protocol and proposes a multipath Congestion and Energy Aware RPL (CEARPL) that alleviates the load balancing and congestion concerns associated with RPL and improves the network performance. For congestion avoidance, a Congestion and Energy Aware Objective Function (CEA-OF) is suggested during parent selection that considers multiple metrics like Child Count metric, Estimated Lifetime metric, and Queue Occupancy metric, to equally distribute the traffic in LLNs. The Queue Occupancy metric is used to detect congestion in the network, and a Multipath routing strategy is utilized to mitigate the congestion in the network. A comparison of the performance of CEA-RPL was made against the existing Objective Functions of RPL, OFO, and MRHOF, as well as COM-OF, utilizing Contiki OS 3.0's Cooja emulator. CEA-RPL projected superior results with power consumption lowering by 33%, end-to-end delay decreasing by 30%, queue loss ratio reducing by 49%, and packet receiving rate and network lifetime improving by 7% and 49%, on an average, respectively.

  Keywords

Congestion, Multipath routing, Internet of Things, Load balancing, Low-power Lossy Networks, Objective function & RPL