RPL-OC: Extension of RPL Protocol for LLN Networks based on the Operator Calculus approach

Technical constraints imposed by low-power and lossy networks (LLNs) require to defer complexity to routing protocols in order to efficiently and reliably transmit packets. However, despite these constraints, the deployment of this type of network has increased considerably over the last years, particularly in smart cities area with focus on sensing applications. In order to effectively address this challenge, we propose a new mechanism for IPV6 Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL) based on the Operator Calculus (OC) approach. In this multi-constrained path optimization problem, OC is applied to extract the feasible end-to-end paths while assigning a rank to each network node. Unlike the standard RPL and its variants which adopt a full distributed strategy, the aim is to provide RPL with a tuple containing the most efficient paths from a source node to the sink by considering multiple routing metrics. The definitive choice of the route is then delegated to RPL in order to take dynamic topology changes into account. The solution thus combines a multi-objective and semi-distributed routing algorithm with the RPL. Furthermore, to benchmark our proposal, we perform a comprehensive evaluation and compare it with other state of the art works. Performance evaluation results show that RPL-OC allows a great improvement compared to OFFL and the standard RPL, mainly in terms of end-to-end delay and energy consumption.