Load-Balanced Structure for RPL-Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

The communication on the wireless sensor network faces resource constraints and an unstable environment. The OF0 and MRHOF are two standardized objection functions for routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL). Both objective functions appear to have low performance on the congested network. In this paper, we introduce the load balancing approach for an RPL-based network. The node discovers its neighbor located in the same rank and exchanges the number of available degrees and expected transmission count metric. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method using the TSCH simulator. The simulation results show that the packet delivery ratio of the proposed method is greater than the OF0 and MRHOF. Moreover, on the small-scale network, the proposal provides a smaller number of packets lost with an acceptable overhead ratio.