Resource oriented and energy efficient routing protocol for IPv6 wireless sensor networks

In the near future, the IPv6 protocol is expected to provide internet connectivity to any object embedding a communication device, by creating the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). In this scenario, IPv6 Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a key role since they can be used to collect several environment information, hence becoming the eyes, ears and nose of the IoT. Since wireless sensors are limited in power, it is essential to design energy efficient WSNs protocols. To this purpose, in this paper, we propose a Resource Oriented and Energy Efficient (ROEE) routing protocol based on the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks (RPL). ROEE RPL is intended as the very first building block to achieve the so called IoT. Simulation results show that our protocol has better performance than the basic RPL in terms of energy efficiency without compromising the network throughput.