Performance Comparison of Multi-Parent and Single Parent Selection of RPL for Smart Grid

To support the number of low-power devices of AMI network, RPL protocol is one of the most interested protocol to be implemented for the limited ability and energy resource devices. Parent selection is the critical function which is used to select the node to forward data from meters to the utility. The tradeoff between energy consumption and PDR is the major issue of parent selection that is difficult to be addressed by the single parent scheme. Therefore, multi-parent schemes are proposed to solve this issue by splitting the large size of data into small packets and forward them to all candidate parents considered by parents' quality. In this paper, we investigate the optimal parameters for two efficient multi-parent selection including MELT and MAHP. Then, we compare their performance to the single parent scheme and analyze their advantages/disadvantages. As a result, a single parent gives the highest network lifetime since it consumes less energy for forwarding data but it cannot balance meter workload. Moreover, it cannot achieve the high PDR at long transmission distance. On the other hand, MELT and MAHP achieves higher PDR with long distance and can balance workload effectively which can facilitate the maintenance planning. However, they present lower network lifetime as compared to single parent.