RPL Objective Function for Multihop PLC Network

Abstract

The increasing number of devices in the Internetof things (IoT) is beginning to exhaust the wireless channel. As an alternative, power line communication (PLC) appearspromising and has the potential of providing easy deploymentat low cost. On one hand, PLC resembles wireless low-powerand lossy networks (LLN). Its performance is time-varying andsensitive to noise, interference, and asymmetry owing to co-existing electronic appliances. However, when running the stan-dard IPv6 routing protocol for LLN (RPL) on PLC, the networksuffers significant reliability loss because RPL does not reflectthe unique characteristics of PLC. To address this problem,we propose PLC-OF, an objective function (OF) for RPL overPLC. PLC-OF exploits PLC’s physical layer (PHY) diversity asa routing metric distinct from other approaches in wireless. PLC-OF finds the most suitable path to prepare for suddeninterference or congestion in power lines. Evaluation results fromreal testbed experiments show that PLC-OF better tolerates noisymedium compared to existing objective functions. Particularly,PLC-OF has better reliability (≈10%) and robustness with lesschannel usage (≈30%) than that of ETX-based MRHOF in highlycongested environments.