Eureka! Institutional Repository

Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) have a crucial role in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. For the IPv6 Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL), two Objective Functions (OFs) have been standardized, the ObjectiveFunction zero (OF0) and the Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function (MRHOF). However, these objective functions are used to build a topology where bottleneck nodes may suffer from an excessive unbalanced traffic load. This problem is called load distribution problem and as a result, the overload nodes will drain much faster than other nodes. In this thesis, we propose a new objective function called Traffic Aware Objective Function (TAOF) that balances the traffic load each node processes to ensure node lifetime maximization. To implement our proposal, we have altered the DIO message format and introduced a new RPL metric named traffic rate which measures the traffic load. Simulation experiments have been conducted to examine the performance of our proposal. We have evaluated its performance by comparing the achieved packet delivery ratio, the number of sent DODAG Information Object (DIO) control messages and the number of parent changes in comparison to other existing OFs