An Energy-Efficient Region-Based RPL Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks

Routing plays an important role in the overall architecture of the Internet of Things. IETF has standardized the RPL routing protocol to provide the interoperability for low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). LLNs cover a wide scope of applications, such as building automation, industrial control, healthcare, and so on. LLNs applications require reliable and energy-efficient routing support. Point-to-point (P2P) communication is a fundamental requirement of many LLNs applications. However, traditional routing protocols usually propagate throughout the whole network to discover a reliable P2P route, which requires large amount energy consumption. Again, it is challenging to achieve both reliability and energy-efficiency simultaneously, especially for LLNs. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-efficient region-based routing protocol (ER-RPL), which achieves energy-efficient data delivery without compromising reliability. In contrast of traditional routing protocols where all nodes are required for route discovery, the proposed scheme only requires a subset of nodes to do the job, which is the key of energy saving. Our theoretical analysis and extensive simulation studies demonstrate that ER-RPL has a great performance superiority over two conventional benchmark protocols, i.e., RPL and P2P-RPL.