Trickle-Plus: Elastic Trickle Algorithm for Low-Power Networks and Internet of Things

Constrained Low-power and Lossy networks (LLNs) represent the building block for the ever-growing Internet of Things (IoT) that deploy the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy networks (RPL) as a key routing standard. RPL, along with other routing protocols, relies on Trickle algorithm as a mechanism for controlling and maintaining the routing traffic frequency. The efficiency of Trickle has been approved in terms of power consumption and scalability. However, different settings of Trickle parameters affect differently the routing behavior, energy consumption and network convergence time. In particular, a network could be only configured to have either lower convergence time with high power consumption or vice versa using Trickle. Thus, motivated by this observation, the paper presents Trickle-Plus as an extended version of the Trickle algorithm. Trickle-Plus increases the elasticity of the protocol, enabling the network configuration within guaranteed optimality for both convergence time and energy consumption. Our simulation experiments confirm the gains of the proposed Trickle-Plus under different operating conditions.