Weighted Sum Metrics – Based Load Balancing RPL Objective Function for IoT

The technological development of Internet of Things (IoT) applications is emerging and attracting the attention of the real world in the automated industry, agriculture, environment, and scientific community. In most scenarios, extending the network lifetime of an IoT network is highly challenging because of constrained nodes. The wireless sensor network (WSN) is the core component of IoT applications. In addition, the WSN nodes are required for the network processes, particularly routing, energy maintenance, load balance, congestion control, packet delivery, quick response, and more. The failure of any of the above network processes will affect the entire network operation. IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy network (RPL) provides high routing solutions to IoT applications requirements. The load balance, congestion control, traffic load, and bottleneck problems are still open issues in the RPL. To resolve the load balance issue, we propose a weighted sum method objective function (WSM-OF), which provides the ability to select the alternative parent in routing by RPL metrics. WSM-OF adopts congestion control and load balancing to avoid heavy traffic and extend the network's node lifetime. The network parameters of control overhead, jitter, packet delivery ratio, parent switching, energy consumption, latency, and network lifetime are implemented and analyzed through the COOJA simulator. The result shows that the WSM-OF improves the network performance and significantly enhances the network lifetime by up to 7.8%.