A Link Quality Aware Parent Selection Mechanism for Enhanced RPL Routing in 6TiSCH Networks

The growth of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has highlighted the need for reliable communication systems that ensure high network reliability, low power consumption, and deterministic latency. Therefore, an effective routing strategy is needed in such networks to achieve effective communication. While the 6TiSCH working group introduced the RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks), it has limitations in challenging industrial environments where diverse wireless technologies may degrade link quality. As RPL's objective functions do not consider actual link quality, nodes might select parents and paths with suboptimal link quality. This paper addresses this issue by incorporating link quality in parent selection and proposing an enhanced RPL for 6TiSCH Networks. Through trace-based simulations, the proposed techniques showcase superior performance in achieving high reliability and low latency when compared to RPL.