A New Routing Objective Function for IETF 6TiSCH Protocol

Wireless sensor networks consist of nodes having low power and limited transmission range. Therefore, several protocols and mechanisms are proposed for these networks to achieve stability and reliability that industrial applications must have. One of these protocols is RPL, which is responsible for routing operations in the network. Since the nodes are located without knowing their neighbors and network topology, they have to select their parent node among of neighbors when they join the network. Due to experienced packet losses in the network, nodes have to change their parents over time. Inaccurate parent selection or frequent parent switching affects the performance of the network negatively especially in IETF 6TiSCH protocol stack. In this paper; A new parent selection function is proposed for RPL running on top of IETF 6TiSCH protocol stack, which, for each node, takes into account the number of neighbors and the traffic through these routing nodes. Our tests showed a significant improvement in terms of the total number of parent switches and packet delivery rates.