Research On Energy-Efficient RPL Routing Protocol And Multi-path Optimization For Wireless Sensor Networks

WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) is a distributed sensor network, which consists of a lot of sensors that can sense the external environment. Sensors in WSN form a multi-hop and self-organizing network by wireless communication. They can move the position in the WSN, dynamically join or leave the sensor network. Network topology will change as sensors move around in WSN. Sensors collect, compute and transmit data coordinately. When supporting IPv6 protocol, sensors in WSN can communicate with a wide variety of equipment in Internet through a gateway if we need, but the routing protocols for Internet and old WSN are not suitable for the modern wireless sensor networks. Since current WSN has complex network environment and unstable topologies, low power battery driving sensors with limited computing and storage capabilities, thus working group ROLL(Routing Over Low power and Lossy Networks) in IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) proposed an IPv6 routing protocol for LLN(Low power and Lossy Networks)-RPL(IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks). Basically, RPL uses single path routing, it's easy to construct and maintain the topologies of WSN and it can meet the basic requirements of low amount of data and delay insensitive scenarios, but powerless for large amount of data and delay sensitive scenarios. That's why multipath transmission is so important that we need take great efforts to study it, especially for energy efficient multipath RPL routing protocol. It can not only improve network transmission capacity, reduce delays, but also balance sensors' power consumption and network traffic to improve the network lifecycle, enhance the capacity of the entire system.This paper presents an energy efficient multi-path routing protocol EMP-RPL, which can not only increase the network transmission capacity, reduce latency and packet loss rate, but also balance the network traffic and node energy to enhance the network life cycle and whole system capacity.