Research Area:  Internet of Things
The routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) is a standard routing framework for Internet of Things (IoT). It supports multipoint-to-point (MP-to-P), point-to-point (P-to-P) and point-to-multipoint (P-to-MP) communications. It is known that RPL-s control overhead can result in the protocol-s poor performance in P-to-P and P-to-MP communications especially in its non-storing mode of operation. Here, we present a routing protocol for the Internet of Things (RIoT) that supports MP-to-P, P-to-P and P-to-MP communications. The protocol can construct P-to-P and P-to-MP routes with relatively lower control overhead. Another salient feature of RIoT is that it supports multiple gateways in the same network with an aim to reduce memory requirement for storing a forwarding table. Furthermore, RIoT is also capable of handling mobility-based IoT use cases. To facilitate communication among nodes connected to different gateways in the same network, here we also present an inter-gateway communication mechanism. We implemented RIoT in the Contiki operating system, and it is extensively evaluated using emulation and real testbed-based experiments. We analyzed the impact of the number of gateways, radio duty cycling (RDC) and mobility on the routing protocol-s performance. Our results demonstrate that either with or without RDC RIoT demonstrates statistically significantly better packet delivery ratio, per-packet end-to-end delay and control overhead compared to the RPL-based protocol. RIoT-s multi-gateway communication architecture substantially reduces the memory requirement to store a forwarding table. Our results also demonstrate that multiple gateways in a network reduce the network partitioning problem in mobile scenarios. Hence, RIoT also demonstrates better performance in mobile scenarios compared to the RPL-based protocol.
Keywords:  
Author(s) Name:  Muhammad Omer Farooq
Journal name:  The Computer Journal
Conferrence name:  
Publisher name:  OUP
DOI:  10.1093/comjnl/bxaa012
Volume Information:  Volume: 63, Issue: 1, Page(s): 958 - 973
Paper Link:   https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9266989