OF-FL: QoS-aware fuzzy logic objective function for the RPL routing protocol

Low power and lossy networks (LLNs) require efficient routing protocols that should meet the requirements of the critical applications, such as real-time, reliability and high availability. RPL has been recently proposed by the ROLL working group as a tree routing protocol specifically designed for LLNs. It relies on objective functions to construct routes that optimize or constrain a routing metric on the paths. However, the working group did not specify the set of metrics and/or constraints to be used to specify the preferred path, and left it open to implementations. In this paper, we design OF-FL, a novel objective function that combines a set of metrics in order to provide a configurable routing decision based on the fuzzy parameters. OF-FL has the advantage to consider the application requirements in order to select the best paths to the destination. Our evaluation with a large-scale testbed in ContikiOS reveals that OF-FL can achieve remarkable performance of the RPL-based LLNs in comparison with the existing objective functions, and appropriately satisfy the quality of service contract of the different applications.