Performance Evaluation of ETXPC-RPL Routing Algorithm in IoT Network

Nowadays physical objects have an ability to connect to the internet, process, analyze the data to the real world through the Internet of Things (IoT). These physical objects have a limited processing space, storage, memory, and bandwidth. Routing becomes a significant factor throughout the data transmission process in IoT devices. The network layer Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) provides communication and the performance of information exchange among the IoT devices. The RPL protocol was mainly designed to perform data transmission effectively in the network with low dynamic traffic. Then, in large network traffic, heavy dynamic traffic scenarios it encounters network congestion problems due to load imbalance distribution. Several RPL load balancing routing algorithms have existed intended to improve network reliability. The Expected Transmission Count and Parent count (ETXPC) objective function is one of the load balancing objective functions that have been evaluated in a burst traffic network scenario. However, this study evaluates the performance of ETXPC objective function in the RPL general IoT network with regards to different network densities. For this study, we applied the parent count (PC), expected transmission count (ETX), and Buffer Occupancy (BO) routing metrics to guide the data packets. The performance metrics considered for evaluation were energy consumption, the ratio of packets delivered, control overhead, and end-to-end delay. In large traffic network ETXPC provides unreliable links that decrease packet delivered successfully and increases control overhead. The algorithm balances the load distribution such a way that it reduces the network delay and energy consumption in the general IoT network.