Cluster-parent based RPL for Low-Power and Lossy Networks in building environment

Low-Power and Lossy networks (LLNs) cover a wide scope of applications, including, but not limit to, industrial control, healthcare and building automation, which has proliferated into both industrial and academic areas in recent years. Routing plays a significant role to the overall architecture of LLNs. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is standardized by IETF to provide interoperability for LLNs. Traditional routing protocols deliver packets through single relay and cannot cope well with the unreliable wireless medium. In this paper, we propose a cluster-parent based RPL protocol (CRPL), which is an opportunistic coordination forwarding scheme. In CRPL, through a top-down approach, an optimization problem is formulated. And the optimal cluster-parent set is selected to minimize the end-to-end cost for individual node. Priority-based scheduling mechanism is applied to coordinate the cluster-parent set for packet forwarding. We compare CRPL with RPL, and another recent work, ORPL on NS3 platform. The performance metrics in terms of packet delivery ratio, number of retransmission and average path cost are measured under various scenarios. Simulation results show that CRPL outperforms RPL and ORPL with significant improvement on the network reliability and reduction of packet retransmission.