Toward Improved RPL: A Congestion Avoidance Multipath Routing Protocol with Time Factor for Wireless Sensor Networks

Designing routing protocols in Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) imposes great challenges. In emergency scenarios, the large and rapid data traffic caused by emergencies will lead to network congestion and bring about significant packet loss and delay. Routing protocol for LLNs (RPL) is the IETF standard for IPv6 routing in LLNs. The basic version of RPL uses Expected Transmission Count (ETX) as the default routing metric; it cannot solve the problem of sudden large data traffic. In this paper, we propose a congestion avoidance multipath routing protocol which uses composite routing metrics based on RPL, named CA-RPL. A routing metric for RPL that minimized the average delay towards the DAG root is proposed, and the weight of each path is computed by four metrics. The mechanism is explained and its performance is evaluated through simulation experiments based on Contiki. Simulation results show that the proposed CA-RPL reduces the average time delay by about 30% compared to original RPL when the interpacket interval is short and has almost 20% reduction in packet loss ratio. The CA-RPL can effectively alleviate the network congestion in the network with poor link quality and large data traffic and significantly improve the performance of LLNs.