An Energy Efficient and Reliable Composite Metric for RPL Organized Networks

In the recent past, we witnessed to a dramatic growth of networks with a huge number of interconnected wireless nodes exchanging large amounts of information. This has brought to the need of ad-hoc, energy-aware protocols suitable for low-power and lossy networks. Among these, Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is surely one of the most interesting ones. It chooses the optimal routes from a source to a destination node, based on specific metrics. In this work we present a RPL compliant composite metric that considers both reliability and energy. Its aim is twofold. First, it realizes energy consumption balancing, so that each node tends to consume the same amount of energy of all the others, thus prolonging the overall network lifetime. Second, it takes into account data reliability along the paths, expressed by the well known Expected Transmission Count (ETX). The effectiveness of the proposed metric is confirmed by some interesting simulation results, that strongly encourage a deeper investigation on this issue.