Evaluating Routing Protocols for Intermittent Energy Harvesting IoT Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) applications have evolved rapidly in the last few years, many of which use small, pervasive and locally-powered sensing devices. Energy harvesting techniques help to extend the lifetime of these devices. These devices can only work intermittently during power cycles when energy is available, but this is not taken into account by traditional routing protocols. Opportunistic routing is a solution that has been proposed in the literature. This paper evaluates the use of the RPL routing protocol and compares the performance of RPL with ORW and ORPL in intermittent energy harvesting IoT scenarios. The results show that ORPL slightly outperforms RPL in the number of received packets with different energy harvesting rate. These indicate that ORPL can be a better solution to the communication in multi hop intermittent energy harvesting IoT networks with some modifications.