Four-cycles Delay-Efficient RPL-based Routing
approach For IoT applications
Manar Al Bataineh Tasneem Al Mallah
Computer Science Department, Computer Science Department,
Jordan University of Science and Jordan University of Science and
Technology Technology
Irbid, Jordan Irbid, Jordan
mkalbataineh16@cit.just.edu.jo taalmallah16@cit.just.edu.jo
Yaser Khamayseh
Computer Science Department,
Jordan University of Science and
Technology
Irbid, Jordan
yaser@just.edu.jo,
Abstract—In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the Routing
Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is praised as
one of the most widely used routing protocols. In RPL, the
Network is divided into a group of subgraphs. The best path can
be computed by using an objective function and set of metrics.
This paper proposes an enhancement for RPL by using four
different cycle times to reduce the delay. This enhancement is
projected to achieve better improvement if most of the nodes run
in low duty cycles at the MAC layer. Cooja simulator using the
Contiki 3.0 operating system is used to evaluate the performance
of the proposed enhancement. The results inferred that the
proposed enhanced scheme is better than the Expected
Transmission Count (ETC) approach in terms of end-to-end
delay. The end-to-end delay of all nodes is reduced, particularly
for the nodes positioned far from the root node.
Keywords: RPL, WSN, duty cycles, delay, objective functions.
I. INTRODUCTION
The smart grid is the 21st-century concept of the
power grid [1]. It is an electricity network that
combines users with their actions connected to the
Network to establish smart, reliable, available, and
efficient communication. One of the essential
components for the smart grid is the Advanced
Metering Infrastructure (AMI). AMI [2] is a
communication between the different types of
meters (gas, water, electric meters) and the
companies' utilities. This infrastructure has three
components; the customer site, which includes the
(gas, water, electric) meters that sense and collect
the data from different environments. The second
component is the communication network used to
send the data to the main utility control center.
XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/$XX.00 ©20XX IEEE
Wail Mardini Sahil Imtiyaz
Computer Science Department, School of Advanced Studies,
Jordan University of Science and University of Camerino
Technology Italy Irbid, Jordan
Irbid, Jordan sahil.imitiyaz@unicam.it,
mardini@just.edu.jo
Muneer Bani Yasin
Computer Science Department,
Jordan University of Science and
Technology
Irbid, Jordan
masadeh@just.edu.jo
Finally, the service provider (utility) component
that has an AMI host help to receive the data from
the Network and send it to the Meter Data
Management System (MDMS) to manage this big
data. The use of AMI is becoming very important in
smart cities because of the extensive collected data
from many sources, where AMI is responsible for
the water, gas, and electric meters distribution on
the Network, as well as the measurement,
configuration, and controlling the power
consumption of these meters. Building an AMI
network could utilize both wired or wireless
communication technologies; however, utility
companies prefer wireless connection [3], although
wired connections are more reliable, secure, higher
bandwidth, and more affordable.
The main reason for choosing wireless
connection is the need for less installation cost and
its ability to provide fast deployment in large areas.
In [4], the authors solved the traffic congestion
problem attached to a heterogeneous wireless
network by designing a new network architecture to
satisfy many QoS requirements such as mobility,
routing, and node deployment for the future
Internet. The authors in [5] reduced the energy
consumption in the transmission step of the WSN
by applying a hybrid optimization technique. They
used Bacterial Swarm Optimization (BSO)
technique, which finds the optimal node for the next
hub. Therefore, it finds the optimal path or route
where the selection of the next node is based on the
overall energy consumption and the distance
between the base station and the gateway.
The smart meters in the AMI are embedded
devices with limited resources, such as processing,
power, and memory resources. Because of these
limitations, the AMI networks connect the devices
through low bandwidth, unstable, low power, and
high packet loss rate links, such as IEEE 802.11 and
IEEE 1901.2 standards [6]. These types of links are
part of networks that are considered low-power and
lossy networks (LLNs). The most used protocol for
this Network is RPL [7]. Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) drafts the standard for routing in low-
power IPv6 Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in
2012.
RPL is a distance-vector protocol that uses the
distances between the network nodes that constructs
one or more Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic
Graph (DODAG) [8], each with a single root called
Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) root. This root is
responsible for sending all the collected data from
all motes to the border router to be forwarded to the
MDMS for the data management, as shown in
Figure 1. To construct this graph, the DAG root
starts by sending a DODAG Information Object
(DIO) messages to all neighboring nodes
periodically to start constructing the links between
the nodes, then each node broadcast its DIO
message to all reachable nodes, thus each node
selects the best parent node to reach the root from
the DIO messages. This DIO message contains a
considerable amount of information about the
nodes, such as the root node's identity, rank,
objective function, and version number.
Fig. 1. Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) network with the DODAG
construction.
Each node selects the best parent node based on
the used objective function (OF), which refers to
how the node will choose its best parent node that
gives the best bath for the DAG root. This will
reduce power consumption and the delay for the
data transfer IS minimized to prolong the motes
lifetime. There are two well-known objective
functions for the RPL, the first one is the objective
function zero (OF0) [9], and the second is the
Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function
(MRHOF) [10].
The DODAG construction when using the OF0
depends on the rank value of the node, where the
node selects the parent with the minimum hop
count, where the rank of the root must be zero, and
the leaves nodes must have the maximum rank. The
calculation of the rank value is shown in Equation
1, depends on the rank value of the candidate parent
and a minimum hop rank increase valued as 256 in
[10].
Ranknode= Rankparent + MinHopRankIncreas (1)
On the other hand, the MRHOF depends on the
Expected Transmission Count (ETX), when
choosing the best parent. The ETX value depends
on the minimum delay and the high throughput, as
defined in Equation 2 [11]. Where the df is the
forward delivery ratio, and the dr is the reverse
delivery ratio.
Each node in the LLN has a radio transceiver,
and its job is to send the data and listening for any
data to be received. This component has a very high
power consumption in the node. Nodes in the LLN
try to keep this radio transceiver off most of the
unused time to prolong the nodes lifetime. But this
leads to another problem, where the node cannot
receive any data when it is off, so a duty cycle
mechanism at the MAC layer is needed to manage
to turn the node on and off. There are many radio
duty cycle mechanisms that have been proposed,
such as X-MAC [12], WiseMAC [13], and
ContikiMAC [14], that reduces power consumption.
However, these mechanisms have a latency problem
as the sender nodes have to spend more time
waiting for the receiving node to be ON, which
increases the end-to-end delay.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 discusses some previous works about
RPL. Section 3 discusses the platform and all
materials we used to perform the experiments and
the set of results we have. Section 4 and 5 discuss
our contribution and its performance evaluation.
Section 6 introduces the conclusion and the future
work.
II. RELATED WORK
Recently several researchers studied the
performance of the RPL in several use cases. In
[15], the authors suggested a new RPL routing
metric referred to as Averaged Delay (AVG_DEL),
which purposed to reduce the average delay from
any node to the DAG root, assuming that all nodes
work with low duty cycles at the MAC layer. Also,
this paper enhances ContikiMAC to provide various
sleeping periods of the nodes. Cooja simulator
using the Contiki is used to evaluate the suggested
AVG_DEL metric and compare it with ETX in
terms of average delay and performance. The
obtained results show that the AVG_DEL metric
minimizes the average delay towards the DAG root,
particularly for nodes that existed far from the DAG
root. Also, it achieved better performance than the
ETX metric. The proposed metric is agreed to the
cumulative sum of the hop-by-hop delays over the
path from a node to the DAG root. The AVG-DEL
metric can be computed as follow: for the DAG
root, the AVG-DEL is Zero, and for the other
nodes, the AVG-DEL = AVG-DELp + Dp, where
the AVG-DEL p is the average delay declared by a
candidate parent, and D p is a delay between the
node and its candidate parent. There are two
different equations that can be used to calculate the
delay between the node and its parent. The use of
one of the two equations depends on whether the
cycle time for the node and its parent is the same or
not. The node calculates the AVG-DEL toward
each parent and then selects the parent with a
minimum delay to accede to the current DODAG,
but if AVG-DELp + Dp is greater than some
maximum threshold (Dmax) then the AVG-DEL for
this node equal Dmax. The node can select the best
parent from all candidates by learning the wake-up
phases for its neighbors through the construction of
the DAG. However, no IP communication occurs
until the DAG is constructed. This problem can be
solved by allowing a node to transmit a unicast
MAC-layer packet to a candidate parent to detect its
wake-up interval. The node learns the wake-up
interval of the candidate parent upon reception of
the acknowledgment message.
In [16], the author evaluates the performance of
the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy
Networks (RPL) in outdoor Smart Grid Substation
Network. The obtained results indicate that the PRL
has significant advantages of low delay and limited
overhead control. Its rapid repair of a local cut of a
link to the root node provides a fair path near to
optimal shortest path for outdoor deployment.
In [17], the author investigated and discussed the
load balancing and congestion problem of RPL.
Mainly, it shows that congestion causes the loss of
most packets in the Network. Therefore, the load
balancing problem becomes clear in RPL in terms
of the selection of routing parent. An efficient
queue utilization-based RPL (QU-RPL) was
proposed to realize load balancing and improve
packet delivery performance against the standard
RPL. The results show that the QU-RPL scheme
minimizes the queue loss by up to 84% and
enhances the packet delivery ratio by up to 147%
against the standard RPL.
Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)
consists of smart meters that constrain the
processing power and storage capabilities. The
Network that connects these meters is called LLNs.
This Network requires a routing mechanism that
considers reducing energy use and consumption and
extending network lifetime. An efficient routing
metric is suggested in [11] for energy-constrained
devices is called routing protocol for LLN (RPL).
Additionally, in [11], it is also proposing a
mechanism to select the best parent node that
considers the residual energy and queue utilization
of neighboring nodes. The results obtained in [11]
show that the network performance is enhanced in
terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and average
power consumption.
Cognitive radio technology plays a vital role in
wireless communications to overcome radio
spectrum shortages, especially in smart grid
applications that require Quality of Service (QoS).
In [18], a new RPL-based routing protocol is
introduced for Cognitive Radio enabled AMI
networks called CRB-RPL (Cognitive Receiver-
based RPL) to facilitate and enhance QoS in
cognitive radio-enabled AMI networks. The results
reported in [18] show that the proposed routing
protocol outperformed current routing protocols for
cognitive radio-enabled AMI networks.
Due to the existing challenges in wireless links
(e.g., unreliability) and sensor nodes (e.g., resource
constraints), a single-path routing protocol cannot
be effective and efficient to meet the performance
required by different applications. To avoid these
problems, the authors in [19] proposed three
multipath schemes based on RPL (Fast Local
Repair-FLR, Energy Load Balancing-ELB, and
their combination-ELB-FLR). The results from [19]
show that the new approaches have achieved better
performance in terms of energy efficiency, packet
delivery rate, network load balance, and end-to-end
delay compared with the traditional RPL scheme.
In [20], a low overhead RPL routing protocol
mechanism is proposed that guarantees the lack of
loops and reacts rapidly to any topology changes by
utilizing a link reversal algorithm. The results show
that this mechanism reduces the number of routing
messages and enhances the network performance in
terms of link failures.
Due to the lack of resilience and the absence of
different options to run the RPL routing protocol in
various environments and under different
simultaneous criteria, in [21], the author proposes
the usage of combined metrics and comprehensive,
objective functions that accommodate various
criteria than the traditional RPL implementations.
The results reported in [21] show that the proposed
implementation enhances the protocol's
performance in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio
(PDR), overhead, and energy consumption.
Moreover, the authors confirmed that using
composite functions and metric containers is more
adaptable and flexible for designing a network with
different quality of service requirements pertaining
to the designer's desire.
In [16], a simulation study is presented to
evaluate the performance of RPL's routes quality in
terms of path length with attached to shortest paths.
The results show that, compared with the optimal
path, the quality of the RPL path is not considered
worse. Besides, in [16] it also appears that, in the
fixing process of connection outages, the local
repair mechanisms are considered faster than global
repair mechanisms.
III. METHODOLOGY AND PRELIMINARY RESULTS
The AVG_DEL routing metric is evaluated in
[15] by the Cooja simulator utilizing the Contiki 2.6
operating system. They compared the AVG_DEL
routing metric with ETX. All works of RPL are not
intended only for AMI networks. It may be utilized
for different applications as well. In wireless
environments, the device can be stationary or
mobile based on the deployment and application.
To better understand the behavior of the Network
under the operation of the RPL protocol, we re-
simulates the proposed routing metric (AVG-DEL)
using manual topology with the number of nodes
equals to 19, as shown in Figure 2. We used one
sink node and 19 client nodes. The motes used in
this study simulate Tmote sky sensors. Cooja Unit
Disk Graph Medium (UDGM) is used as a channel
model to model looseness in the wireless medium,
which stratified looseness that is attached to the
node distance in the radio medium. Every radio link
is recognized as error-free, the Packet Delivery
Ratio (PDR) is 100%.
We used 50 meters for the transmission range
and 30 meters for interference ranges. The node that
is numbered as 1 represents the root (sink) node,
and the other nodes represent the client's nodes that
sense, gather, and transmit packets to the border
router. The generated extensive simulation results
indicate that the following value for the four cycles
produced the best performance. We used different
cycle times, the cycle time of the central backbone
is 0.125 seconds, and the nodes that are positioned
at the border have longer cycle times equal to 0.2
seconds. The sink node is always ON with a 100%
duty cycle. The simulation parameters are listed in
Table 1.
The obtained results for both AVG_DEL and
MRHOF are shown in Figure 3. Using the
AVG_DEL objective function, almost all nodes
improved their delay compared to the case for using
the MRHOF objective function. The nodes that
achieved the most remarkable improvements are
located far from the DAG root and have the highest
ranks, such as nodes 18 and 19. The nodes located
with close proximity to the DAG root did not
achieve much improvement because they are one
hop away from the root, such as nodes 2, 3, 10, and
11. The total average delay for all nodes while average delay toward the DAG root. The average
using the AVG_DEL is 210.1 ms, which improves delay is calculated based on the cycle time for each
the average delay by about 40% over the MRHOF. node. This paper evaluates the AVG_DEL routing
metric using the Cooja simulator. The simulation
TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETERS
parameters that have been used in the simulation
Parameter Value are: two different cycle time, the cycle time of
Simulator Cooja Contiki peripheral nodes equals to 0.2s, and the cycle time
Nodes Type 3.0 TMote Sky of central backbone nodes equals to 0.125s, and
Number of Nodes 19 topology as a manual topology consist of one sink
Packet Delivery Ratio 100% node and 18 client nodes that simulated TMote Sky
sensors.
CT of central backbone 0.125s
CT of peripheral nodes
nodes 0.2 s
Duty Cycle for Root Node 100%
Number of sent Packets 1000 packet
Topology
for each node Manual
Radio Medium UDGM
Topology
TX Ratio 50 meters
TX Range 30 meters

Fig. 3. The average delay from each node towards the DAG root.

In this work, we are going to use four different

Fig. 2. The construction of the Network using 19 TMote Sky nodes.
The nodes in the WSN are embedded devices
that have some constraints on power and battery
lifetime. The radio transceiver in each node should
be in the OFF mode as much as possible to preserve
their batteries and to extend the network lifetime. A
duty cycling mechanism turns on these meters
periodically to preserve its battery's lifetime. This
mechanism influences the latency of the Network.
In [15], a new routing metric was proposed
referred to AVG_DEL routing metric that aims to
reduce the average delay from each node to DAG
root when selecting the best parent node to enhance
the network lifetimes. When a node joins a
DODAG, it chooses the preferred parent node as the
next hop to the DAG root. The node calculates the
AVG-DEL for each parent and then selects the
parent with the minimum delay to reduce the
cycle times instead of two values. These cycle times
are distributed randomly and non-randomly on the
Network, and the used cycle times are 0.125s, 0.2s,
0.3s, and 0.5s, respectively. The sink node is always
ON with a 100% duty cycle. We will simulate the
proposed routing metric for random and grid
topologies with different nodes. Firstly, we will use
one sink node and 20 client nodes and then use one
sink node and 49 client nodes for both topologies.
The motes that will be used in this simulation are
the TMote sky sensors. Then, study the impact of
the average end-to-end delay toward the DAG root
when nodes with different cycle times are randomly
distributed on the Network or orderly distributed.
Furthermore, we compare the results of the
AVG_DEL routing metric after using four cycle
times with the ETX metric, and the AVG_DEL
routing metric with two cycle times for both
random and grid topologies. Moreover, we propose
to enhance the network performance in terms of
power consumption and network life time by
selecting the appropriate parent node which has
minimum average delay and more residual energy.
 IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
The proposed enhancement has been
implemented using the Cooja simulator in Contiki
3.0 operating system. There were multiple tests
based on the number of nodes, topology, and the
distribution of the nodes regarding the cycle time
value. The results have been compared with the
ETX and the proposed method in [15] that uses the
AVG_DEL with only two different cycle time
values, 0.2s, and 0.125s. Some parameters were
fixed for all the test scenarios, as shown in Table 2.
There are two different test scenarios. The first test
scenario is similar to the test scenario in [15],
except for the cycle time values. The second test
scenario uses the random topology.
TABLE II. FIXED ATTRIBUTES FOR ALL TEST SCENARIOS.
Parameter Value
Simulator Cooja Contiki
Nodes Type 3.0 TMote Sky
Packet Delivery 100%
Duty Cycle for Root
Ratio 100%
Number of sent 1000 packet
Node
Radio
Packets forMedium
each node UDGM
TX Ratio 50 meters
TX Range 30 meters
The first tested scenario is composed of 19
nodes, as shown in Figure 4. There is one root DAG
node and 18 normal nodes with different cycle
times. The central nodes have the lower cycle times
equal to 0.125 seconds and 0.2 seconds, as shown in
blue and yellow. Nodes with longer cycle times are
placed at the borders with 0.3 seconds and 0.5
seconds cycle times and colored in pink and orange.
Figure 4 also shows how the DODAG has been
formed in both ETX and AVG_DEL with cycle
times. In ETX, nodes will choose the best parent
based on minimizing the number of expected
transmissions to reach the sink node. For that, the
nodes will choose the parents that could reduce the
network density. On the other hand, using four
cycle times in the AVG_DEL metric, nodes will
choose the parent with the shortest sleeping period
to reduce the delay while sending the packets.
Nodes 3, 2, 10, and 11 choose to connect with the
DAG root because its radio is always ON. Each
node will try to connect with the neighbor node that
has the lowest sleeping periods because the
connection will be faster, as in nodes 6, 5, 8, 12, 13,
15, and 17. But still, some nodes contradicted this
fact and chose nodes with the same or larger cycle
times, like nodes 4, 7, 14, and 16.
In Figure 5, it is obvious that the end-to-end
delay to the DAG root has been improved almost
for all nodes when the AVG_DEL metric has been
used. The delay for the nodes with one hop from the
DAG root did not change, such as nodes 2, 3, 10,
and 11. In comparison, the massive reduction in the
delay occurs at the nodes located far away from the
DAG root. On the other hand, the AVG_DEL with
two different cycle times showed comparable
performance to the four-cycle times AVG_DEL
version but still shows better results than the ETX
metric. The average delay for all nodes for using
ETX, 2CT AVG_DEL, and 4CT AVG_DEL metrics
are 259 ms, 181 ms, and 195 ms, respectively. The
total delay for all nodes for the 4CT AVG_DEL
metric has been improved by 25% compared with
the ETX metric. In contrast, the 2CT AVG_DEL
metric improved the total average delay by 30%
compared to the EXT metric and 8% compared to
the 4CT AVG_DEL metric.
In the second test scenario, the used topology is
the random topology with 21 and 33 nodes. For
each number of nodes, there are three different
DODAG to be constructed for each metric. The first
one is to use the ETX metric, where all nodes have
the same cycle time and the same wake-up phase.
The second metric is the improved metric in [15]
the AVG_DEL metric. In this metric, nodes have
two different cycle times 0.2 s and 0.125 s.
The third metric is the proposed improved metric
based on the AVG_DEL metric, where it uses four
different cycle times instead of two. The number of
constructed DODAG is six. Figure 6 shows two of
the constructed networks as a random topology with
a different number of nodes. Table 3 shows the used
parameters in this test.
In the 4CT AVG_DEL metric, the 21 nodes were
distributed as 5 nodes for each cycle time, and one
node for the sink node, and the 33 nodes were
distributed as 8 nodes for each cycle time and one
sink node. While in the 2CT AVG_DEL metric, the
21 nodes were distributed as 10 nodes for each
cycle time and one node for the sink node, and the
33 nodes were distributed as 16 nodes for each
cycle time and one sink node. Figure 7 shows the
average delay for each node in the 21 nodes
network. The 2CT AVG_DEL metric achieved the
minimum delay for almost all nodes that come back
to the values of the cycle time, where both of the
used cycle times are small values. The sleeping
period is short, and even if a node is surrounded
only by nodes with a larger cycle time, the delay
will be lower than the ETX metric, therefor it
improved the total average delay for all nodes by
30%.
TABLE III. SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Parameter Value
Number of Nodes 21, 33 nodes
Fig. 6. RPL random topology for a different number of nodes using the 4CT
CT1 (blue nodes) 0.125s AVG_DEL.
CT2 (yellow nodes) 0.2 s
CT3 (pink nodes) 0.3 s
CT4 (orange nodes) 0.5 s
Topology Manual
Topology

Fig. 7. Average delay from each node towards the DAG root for the ETX,
2CT AVG_DEL, and 4CT AVG_DEL metrics for the random topology for 21
nodes.
Fig. 4. (a) Network topology. (b) DODAG using the ETX metric. (c) DODAG
using 4 CTs AVG_DEL metric.

Figure 5. The average delay from each node towards the DAG root for the
ETX, 2CT AVG_DEL, and 4CT AVG_DEL metrics.
Fig. 8. The average delay from each node towards the DAG root for the ETX,
2CT AVG_DEL, and 4CT AVG_DEL metrics for the random topology for 33
nodes.
The 4CT AVG_DEL metric outperformed the
ETX metric by only 1%. Using four different cycle
times with significant differences lets some nodes
choose the best parent node with the largest cycle
time. This means that the waiting time will increase
for this node when sending the packets. Therefore,
the delay will increase for that node, as the node 25
in Figure 6(b). Thus, the 2CT AVG_DEL metric is
better than the 4CT AVG_DEL metric by almost
30%. When using 33 nodes in the random topology,
the results are similar to the 21 nodes case, where
the 2CT AVG_DEL metric is the best RPL objective
function to reduce the end-to-end delay, as shown in
Figure 8. The 2CT AVG_DEL metric improved the
average delay for all nodes by 53% and 50%
compared to the ETX and 4CT AVG_DEL metrics,
respectively. And the 4CT AVG_DEL metric
improved the total average delay only by 6%.
V. CONCLUSION
RPL is considered the most suitable routing
protocol for low-power WSNs. In this paper, an
enhancement to the AVG_DEL routing metric for
RPL is suggested to reduce the average delay
towards the DAG root. The suggested enhancement
is evaluated using the Cooja simulator using the
Contiki 3.0 operating system. The performance is
compared with the original AVG_DEL and ETX
metrics. The results obtained from the simulation
show that the end-to-end delay for most nodes is
reduced, particularly for the nodes positioned far
from the root node using the original AVG_DEL.
While the use of four different cycle times in the
AVG_DEL routing metric did not improve the end-
to-end delay, but it is still better than the ETX
metric by almost 23%.
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