Métrica de roteamento para prolongar o tempo de operação de redes de baixa potência e com perdas

Abstract

Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) have gained prominence in the scientific community due to the technological paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT). The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) which dedicates efforts to propose new standards for the Internet, refers to LLNs as networks that integrate with the Internet, i.e., IoT. The routing and packet delivery in LLNs represent a challenge in terms of reliability and energy efficiency. Thus, a routing protocol was designed by the IETF: the RPL (Routing Protocol for LLNs). To establish stable paths across lossy links, RPL considers the costs obtained from metrics for routing decision making. Among these, ETX (Expected Transmission Count) is the most widely used, due to reliability. However, intermediate nodes (where bottlenecks arise) are still harmed due to the rapid exhaustion, thus prompting routing efficiency further investigation. In these terms, this work sought to increase the operation time of these nodes, based on the hypothesis that the estimated energy consumption of the network interface, converted to metric cost, could extend the lifetime of LLNs and increase the packet delivery. These objectives were achieved with several experiments performed in different simulated scenarios, which ended in a new routing metric. Therefore, this document presents the NIAP (Network Interface Average Power), a promising alternative to the ETX metric, which contributes to load balancing, extends the operation time of intermediate nodes, and increases the packet delivery ratio in LLNs.