Energy-Aware Adaptive Trickle Timer Algorithm for RPL-based Routing in the Internet of Things

Routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL) is IPv6 protocol for low power and lossy networks (LLNs) devices. RPL uses the hope count and expected transmission count (ETX) as two routing objective functions (OF). Along with these two OFs, RPL uses a trickle timer algorithm to control the frequency of control messages. However, the RPL standard in its current form does not consider the node energy while routing the traffic. Due to uneven traffic distribution, some parent nodes result in energy hotspots. Similarly, the trickle timer affects the battery and overall convergence time. This paper proposes an efficient energy-aware adaptive trickle (EAAT) timer mechanism for scaling the DIO transmission based on the future energy (FE) and the residual energy (RE) information. The simulation results show that by utilizing the FE based OF and by scaling trickle related parameters prolongs the network lifetime and improves the routing performance.