Mobility-Aware Energy-Efficient Parent Selection Algorithm for Low Power and Lossy Networks

IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) is a standardized routing protocol for the energy-constrained networks in the Internet of Things networks. Nowadays, many real-time applications demand mobility support among the nodes in RPL with a wide range of speed. But, supporting mobility in RPL becomes a critically challenging issue because the devices are resource constrained and the communication links are lossy to establish a stable network. Moreover, control packet overhead increases rapidly over mobility, which in turn drains out energy and affects the overall lifetime of the network. In this paper, we propose a mobility-aware energy efficient parent selection algorithm that supports random mobility of the nodes in RPL and chooses the best parent from the preferred parent list based on the metrics, namely, expected transmission count, expected lifetime, received signal strength indicator, and Euclidean distance (d(ij)) between the mobile node and the parent node under selection. We also propose a dynamic trickle algorithm for Trickle Timer to solve long listen only period and allocates timer dynamically based on the random set of neighbor nodes under mobility. Specifically, this paper analyzes the performance of the proposed algorithm against previous algorithms, namely, original RPL, corona-RPL, enhanced trickle, reverse Trickle Timer mechanism, and mobility-enhanced RPL in terms of packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, and average end-to-end delay under different scenarios.