A multi-sink coordination framework for low power and lossy networks

Low power and lossy networks (LLNs) consist of devices having limited battery power, less memory, reduced processing capability. RPL (Routing Protocol for low power and Lossy networks), is an approved Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard routing protocol for IPv6-based LLNs. RPL uses a proactive routing approach and the sink or controller node within the network creates a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of the network. In a RPL network each node has a path to the sink node and the sink has routing paths to all nodes within the network. In case of multiple sink nodes within the network, nodes attach themselves with DAG of closet sink depending on the objective function used by RPL. In a multi-sink environment sink nodes can coordinate for evenly distributing the network load, increasing network life time, resource sharing and quick data collection. Currently, RPL does not provide any coordination framework that can define message exchange between different sink nodes for enhancing the network performance. In this paper, we propose a novel sink-to-sink coordination framework in RPL network for enhancing overall network throughput and increasing overall network lifetime. The proposed coordination framework uses the network management messages issued by RPL to achieve message exchange between multiple sink nodes. Simulation analysis has shown that the proposed coordination framework enhance network performance of RPL in a multi-sink network.