FAHP-OF: A New Method for Load Balancing in RPL-based Internet of Things (IoT)

One major issue in RPL-based networks is that the nodes themselves have to do routing and packet transmission. At the same time, they may be extremely tight on resources like Energy, Computation, and storage. This issue makes optimized route establishment of paramount importance in RPL-based networks. However, this task is not easy since multiple network links and node metrics must be considered, and different criteria must be satisfied when making decisions. In this paper, we devise and propose Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process Objective Function (FAHP-OF), which takes advantage of Fuzzy Logic as a soft criteria decision-making system and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique. This method feeds three quantitative metrics named Hop-count, ETX, and RSSI of an assortment of eligible parents for a node to the Fuzzy system to decide if a node can abandon its current parent and adopt a new one. Afterward, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) assigns scores to the eligible parents, and the parent with the highest score is adopted. Results obtained by the Cooja simulator indicate improvements in terms of End-to-End Delay (E2ED) and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) in comparison to other objective functions.