Performance Analysis of a New Energy-Aware RPL Routing Objective Function for Internet of Things

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in Internet of Things (IoT). IoT wireless networks are formed of several small devices encompassing the capability of sensing a physical characteristic and sending it hop by hop to a central node or base station. Wireless sensor networks are also termed as Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). Designing an energy efficient routing protocol for LLNs is very important to prolong the lifetime of the IoT network. We propose a new energy-aware objective function for the RPL routing protocol which combines the nodes link quality and their residual energy to improve the network latency and at the same time prolong the life of the sensor nodes. Experimental results using COOJA simulator show an improvement in terms of network latency and remaining energy of around 10% for our protocol ETX-ENR compared to a recently published Fuzzy Logic objective function.