Power-Efficient Trickle Algorithm With Dynamic Adjustment of Idle Interval for Internet-of-Things Application

To address the routing challenges of low-power and lossy networks, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). In RPL, control messages are exchanged to construct and maintain the route. Redundant control messages increase the control overhead and consume power. Hence, the trickle algorithm is used in RPL to control the dissemination of the control message—destination information objects (DIOs). Most of the variants of trickle algorithms have focused on reducing convergence time (CT) but have not considered power consumption (PC) and dynamic traffic rates, which are the main requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT). To fill this gap, we propose the power-efficient trickle algorithm (PETA). In the PETA, we conserve power by dynamically adjusting the idle time left after the DIO transmission. The PETA is compared with the Elastic Hop Count Trickle, Elastic Trickle, and Standard Trickle Algorithms for two objective functions (OFs), namely, minimum rank with hysteresis OF (MRHOF) and Objective Function Zero (OF0). Simulation results obtained from the Contiki OS/Cooja Simulator 3.0 show that using MRHOF in a dynamic scenario, the proposed PETA outperforms benchmark protocols by reducing control overhead by 73% and PC by 55% and increasing the packet delivery ratio (PDR) by 11% in 30-node topology. With constant traffic, the PETA gives promising results by reducing control overhead by 61% and PC by 45% in the 30-node network. The proposed PETA is ideal for energy-critical IoT applications, as evidenced by its decreased PC and better PDR.