Child Count based Load balancing for

Routing Protocol for Low power and

Lossy Networks (ch-LBRPL)

by
A. Sebastian

St. Xavier’s College of Management &

Technology
1 Digha Ghat, Patna
 Internet of Things (IoT)

Things or objects – such as Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags,

Introduction

sensors, actuators, mobile phones, etc. – which, through unique addressing

schemes, are able to interact with each other and cooperate with their
neighbours to reach common goals.
IoT can broadly be defined as a global network infrastructure, linking
uniquely identified physical and virtual objects, things and devices through
the intelligent objects, communication and actuation capabilities. In other
words, the paradigm of IoT is described as “any-time, any place and any-one
connected” (Ryu, Kim, Lee, & Song, 2012)
2 The term Internet of Things was first coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999
 Internet of Things (IoT)
Introduction

3
 Internet of Things (IoT)
Introduction

4
 Internet of Things (IoT)
Introduction

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 Internet of Things (IoT)
Introduction

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 Internet of Things (IoT)
Introduction

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 Routing Protocol for Low Power and
Lossy Networks (RPL)
proposed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
standard for Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLN) defined in RFC6550 for
urban environment, Smart home, Grid and smart cities and in data centers
Support few dozen to a few thousands (5000) of nodes in a single LLN,
LLN are a class of network in which routers (processing power, memory and
energy) and their interconnect (high loss rate, low data rate and instability)
are constrained
Increase in number has limited impact on overall scalability and stability
RPL

between links
RPL uses IPv6 routing protocol for LLN supports MP2P traffic inside LLN from
point to sink, P2MP from sink to point and also supports P2P traffic
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 Routing Protocol for Low Power and
Lossy Networks (RPL)
 used wide range of routing attributes either as a constraint or a metric as against
IGPs such as IS-IS or OSPF
 In constraint routing attribute is used to prune the links and nodes from the
candidate path that does not respect the constraint. In metric routing attribute is used
to determine the least cost path
Routing metrics either be aggregated (path cost equal to sum of the link metrics or
recorded in which case metrics of all links along the path are recorded and
announced along with the path by RPL. Recorded metrics are particularly useful
when aggregating metrics implies loosing relevant information for path selection.
 Metrics can also be local (exchanged between two neighbors) or global
(propagated along the path as the path cost)
 RPL uses dynamic metrics, which implies the use of low pass filters to preserve
routing stability, avoid temporary loops and bind control traffic by limiting the
number of advertised RPL messages due to link metrics updates and consequently
RPL

path cost that may have a global impact by recomputing the routing topology.
 RPL feature supports aggregated metrics only and the following subset of routing
metrics or constraints:
• Routing metrics—ETX (link), Latency (link) and DAG rank.
9 • Routing constraints—Node State and Attribute (NSA), Node Energy (node).
 RPL uses default objective function Of0 (Hop Count) and of1 (ET)
 Routing Protocol for Low Power and
Lossy Networks (RPL)
Each Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) is
identified by
• RPLInstanceID (potentially multiple DODAG but one OF)
• DODAGID (set by the Root)
• DODAGVersionNumber (DODAG iteration number)
• Parameters advertised by the DODAG root: DAG metric
container content, trickle timers, etc.

RPL messages are carried via ICMPv6 message. The following

messages are available:
• DAG Information Solicitation (DIS)
RPL

• DAG Information Object (DIO)

• Destination Advertisement Object (DAO)
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 Routing Protocol for Low Power and
Lossy Networks (RPL)
• Scalability – increase in size of network and its effect on LLN
• Control Plane Overhead – used to manage the stability of the network by
using some randomness to avid collision. Reduce control plane to save
bandwidth and energy
• Path Optimization - mono metric optimization, the best path is considered
as the shortest according to single metric (multimetric optimization not
supported, optimization is not to trade path optimality for network stability)
• Convergence Time – routing protocol convergence time – fast recovery
technique using trickle timer, local repair parameter, neighbour unreachability
detection (NUD)- convergence time will depend on frequency of data traffic
in DODAG
• Flexibility or Extensibility – supports object TLV based approach for
addition of functionalities in future such as new metrics, objective functions
RPL

• Local Confidence - used to determine when a link with another RPL router
or leaf is valid and usable to build a router adjacency and also to declare that
an existing link used by RPL should no longer be used Lossy links have a
tendency to flap and transient states should not trigger routing adjacency
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changes at the risk of routing instability, control traffic churn, etc
 DODAG Construction
0 R DIO
DIS
1 1
A B
2
2 2
C D
3 E
3
F
G
RPL

4 4
I 4
J K
12
UPWARD
 Load Imbalance at DAG level
RPL

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 Load Imbalance at DODAG Level
RPL

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 Load Imbalance problems in RPL
• Energy hole or hotspot problem
• Parent switching problem
• Network instability
• Poor Network performance and
RPL

network life time

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 Objectives
• Identification of Load Imbalance in RPL
• Child count based load balancing
•DAG Load Balancing
•DODAG Load Balancing
RPL

•Multi DODAG Load Balancing

16 • Performance Evaluation
 Notation Summary
Symbol Definition
DAG Directed Acyclic Graph
DODAG Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph

BR Border Router
m Border Router Capacity
n DAG capacity
LBP Load Balancing Parent
P(i, j) Preferred Parents
ECc Expected Child count
LIM Load Imbalance
Pc count Parent child count
Ch-LBRPL

Av Assigned value
EXc Existing Child count
M Gateway capacity
DODAG(n) Number of DODAGs in a Gateway
PP(I,j) Preferred parent in Gateway
GW Gateway
ENc Expected Node count

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Ch-LBRPL
Child count based LBRPL

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 Child count based LBRPL
Expected Child Count (ECc) = Pc count (i)+Pc count (j) +LIM

If ECc is even,

ECc
Expected Child count (ECc) for P(i) =
2
Ch-LBRPL

ECc
Expected Child count (ECc) for P(j) =
2
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 Child count based LBRPL

If ECc is odd,

ECc1
Expected Child count (ECc) for P(i) =
2
Ch-LBRPL

ECc1
Expected Child count (ECc) for P(j) =
2

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 Child count based LBRPL

Av of P(i) = ECc of P(i) - EXc of P(i)

Av of P(j) = ECc of P(j) - EXc of P(j)

Ch-LBRPL

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Ch-LBRPL
Child count Load Balanced LBRPL

RPL Ch-LBRPL
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 Child count based LBRPL in Multi DODAGs
Ch-LBRPL

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 Child count based LBRPL in Multi DODAGs

n
DODAG count   DODAG counti
i 1

ENc
Expected Node count(ENc) for DODAG(i)=
2
Ch-LBRPL

ENc
Expected Node count(ENc) for DODAG(j)=
2

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 Child count based LBRPL in Multi DODAGs

ENc  1
Expected Node count(ENc) for DODAG(i)=
2
Ch-LBRPL

ENc  1
Expected Node count(ENc) for DODAG(j)=
2

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 Related Works
In [9], the authors designed an energy-balancing routing protocol that maximizes the
lifetime of the most constraint nodes. They proposed the Expected Lifetime metric,
denoting the residual time of a node (time until the node will run out of energy).
They also designed mechanism to detect energy-bottleneck nodes and to spread the
traffic load uniformly among them.

In [10] the authors propose three multipath schemes to load balance RPL: Energy
Load Balancing (ELB), Fast Local Repair (FLR) and their combination (ELB-FLR).

In [12] the authors suggest extended Objective Function (LB-OF) that balances the
Ch-LBRPL

number of child nodes of the parent to avoid the overloading problem and ensure
node lifetime maximization in RPL. In LB-OF, a child set is created which provides
each preferred parent with the number of children it has. The rank calculation
considers the child set. The parent with the least number of children will be selected
as preferred parent. Among these, LB-RPL and LB-OF provide partial load balancing

in RPL.
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 Simulation Parameters

Network Values
Parameters
Simulation Model UDGM

No. Of Nodes 31
Area 120mx100m
Startup Delay 65s
Objective Functions MRHOF and OF0

Channel Channel Check rate 8Hz and

Ch-LBRPL

Radio Channel 26
TX and INT Range Tx = 50m and INT = 55m
Simulation Time 600000ms

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 Energy Consumption
Ch-LBRPL

Energy consumption for DAG1 Energy consumption for DAG2

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Ch-LBRPL
Control Traffic Overhead

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 Parent Switching
Ch-LBRPL

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 Conclusions
 Balanced child node distribution
 Hot spot or energy hole problem is handled
 Improved network efficiency and network life time
 Parent switching problem is solved

Future challenges
Ch-LBRPL

 Bandwidth Allocation based load balancing

 Load balancing metric based RPL
 Load balancing in RPL using Machine Learning
31 such as Q-Learning
THANK YOU