Quell: Lightweight Load-Balancing Scheme for 6TiSCH IoT networks
Mojtaba Eshghie, Naser Yazdani · 2018
IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4 (6TiSCH) is the proposed multilayer architecture for Low power Lossy Network (LLN) to enable a fairly big network of things to be connected via multi-hop to the internet. 6TiSCH's IoT stack is used in a wide range of applications such as forest fire detection, home automation and smart city. 6TiSCH has its own way of routing packets in a multi-hop fashion which is handled by Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). RPL routes packets by forming a tree, rooted in the sink containing other nodes to form the network. This graph is called Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG). RPL works by using an objective function which takes into account criteria based on the application and network requirements. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed a de-facto standard objective function which is simple yet effective called Objective Function Zero (OF0). OF0 is the minimalist approach that works in any situation. The only parameter that OF0 takes into account is the Expected Transmission Count (ETX) of the link. We propose a dynamic yet simple objective function called Quell that surpasses the performance of OF0 in certain applications while having the least possible complexity. We discuss the details of Quell and improvements that it offers.