History-based consistency algorithm for the trickle-timer with low-power and lossy networks

Abstract

Recently, the internet of things (IoT) has become an important concept which has changed the vision of the Internet with the appearance of IPv6 over low power and lossy networks (6LoWPAN). However, these 6LoWPANs have many drawbacks because of the use of many devices with limited resources; therefore, suitable protocols such as the Routing Protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) were developed, and one of RPL's main components is the trickle timer algorithm, used to control and maintain the routing traffic frequency caused by a set of control messages. However, the trickle timer suffered from the short-listen problem which was handled by adding the listen-only period mechanism. This addition increased the delay in propagating transmissions and resolving the inconsistency in the network. However, to solve this problem we proposed the history based consistency algorithm (HBC), which eliminates the listen-only period based on the consistency period of the network. The proposed algorithm showed very good results. We measured the performance of HBC trickle in terms of convergence time; which was mainly affected, the power consumption and the packet delivery ratio (PDR). We made a comparison between the original trickle timer, the E-Trickle, the optimized trickle and our HBC trickle algorithm. The PDR and the power consumption showed in some cases better results under the HBC trickle compared to other trickle timers and in other cases the results were very close to the original trickle indicating the efficiency of the proposed trickle in choosing optimal routes when sending messages.