EQ-RPL: An Energy-Efficient and Quality-Aware Routing Protocol for IoT-Based Low-Power and Lossy Networks

Abstract

In recent years, the advances in sensing and communication technologies have led to the rapid development of various applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). The devices in IoT form an autonomous network architecture, in which the device has a limited battery power and the link has a low reliability. This kind of network is called the low-power and lossy network. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks. The proposed protocol introduces a novel rank value to construct a proper destination-oriented directed acyclic graph for the source node to transmit packets to the destination node. The proposed rank value is mainly derived from the expected transmission count, which is widely used to represent the link quality. Moreover, we consider the residual energy as the metric for a node to select the proper node to relay the packet to the destination node. We conducted simulations for performance evaluation, showing that the proposed routing protocol improves the packet delivery ratio, especially for the environment with a high bit error rate. The result also validated that our approach achieves the balance of energy consumption of nodes, compared to the existing approach.