Evaluating the Energy Efficiency of IoT Routing Protocols

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technological paradigm that revolutionizes the way we communicate, live, work and play. Recent growth in the novel and cheap, sensor and actuation devices show that the interest in IoT technologies is phenomenal. IoT devices present several challenges due to device constraints such as limited power, storage, bandwidth, and processing capacity. For a battery powered IoT device to operate for an extended amount of time, it is vitally important for it to be designed to conserve power to ensure realize prolonged network life. In IoT networks, energy is usually expended during the transmission and reception of packets. Ensuring successful transmissions while minimizing energy use is a challenge. Routing protocols play a vital role in facilitating the delivery of these packets from the source to the destination nodes. The use of energy-efficient routing protocols can help to reduce the power consumption of IoT devices. Several routing protocols have been developed for network communication. It is important to evaluate these protocols to find one that is suitable for use in power constrained IoT environments. This study conducts a comparative energy evaluation of RPL (Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy networks) and LOADng (Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector Routing Protocol-Next Generation). The study focuses on the power consumed during the transmission of data between the IoT devices in a network. The Routing protocols are implemented in the Contiki Operating System and evaluated in the Cooja Network Simulator. The results depict that RPL is energy efficient routing protocol.