RMA-RP: A Reliable Mobility-Aware Routing Protocol for Industrial IoT Networks

Abstract

Many emerging Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications involve the use of mobile devices, such as sensors and robots in industrial automation scenarios. Movement of mobile sensor nodes causes intermittent connectivity which in turn deteriorates the network performance in terms of packet loss and delay. The Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is introduced as the standard routing protocol for IIoT networks. Although RPL constitutes a reliable and energy-efficient solution for static networks, there is no mechanism defined in the RPL standard of how to support routing in mobile IIoT networks. This paper introduces RMA-RP, a reliable mobility-aware routing protocol to support mobile IIoT networks. RMA-RP utilizes a dynamic motion detection mechanism based on the link quality to cope with topology changes by updating next-hop nodes. Moreover, an adaptive timer is introduced to manage the transmission rate of control messages in order to decrease the network overhead and in turn the energy consumption. We evaluate the performance of RMA-RP through extensive simulations in comparison to existing works. In the simulated scenarios, the results demonstrate that RMA-RP has at least 17 % higher packet delivery ratio and achieves a reduction of 34 % and 51 % in terms of delay and network overhead, respectively.