Fault-tolerant RPL through context awareness

The Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) has recently been considered as the standard routing protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSN). RPL builds routes between nodes based on specific metrics that reflect arbitrary optimization objectives through the RPL Objective Functions (OFs). In this paper, we propose a Context-Aware Objective Function (CAOF) that takes into account the limited resources of the sensor nodes and their temporal changes. The proposed CAOF optimizes the power exploitation as a critical resource by taking the battery level into consideration in the routing decision. Simulation results show that our CAOF increases the network lifetime by up to 44% compared to non-context-aware OFs of RPL. Furthermore, CAOF ensures more fairness in the exploitation of batteries of the different nodes in the network more than non-context-aware OFs. In addition CAOF enhances the delivery ratio when compared with RPL non-context-aware OFs.