RPL Enhancement Based FL-Trickle: A Novel Flexible Trickle Algorithm for Low Power and Lossy Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an ubiquitous revolutionary technology, covering a set of domains in our daily life objects. IoT makes these objects autonomous with less or no intervention of human activity. A significant component of IoT is the resource constrained low power and lossy networks (LLNs), which use the IPv6 routing protocol over low power and lossy network (RPL) as its routing protocol. RPL has a fundamental component named trickle algorithm. It controls and maintains the routing traffic in the network. However, this algorithm has some shortcoming in terms of power consumption, overhead, and convergence time. To overcome these limitations, we propose in this paper the flexible trickle algorithm (FL-trickle) based on the transmission time and the intervals that specify the period of data delivery. The comparison of FL-trickle with a benchmarked model demonstrates that FL-trickle performs better in terms of convergence time, overhead, energy consumption, network lifetime and the PDR.