E-Trickle: Enhanced Trickle Algorithm for Low-Power and Lossy Networks

Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy networks (RPL) is the de-facto standard for routing in resource-constrained low-power and lossy networks (LLNs) which represent the building block for the ever-growing Internet of Things (IoT). RPL along with other routing protocols make the deployment of Trickle algorithm as a mechanism for controlling and maintaining the routing traffic frequency. Trickle employs two different techniques to manage the routing traffic efficiently. Firstly, the suppression phase where a node suppresses its control data transmission if it is redundant. Secondly, the traffic frequency adaptation, where the nodes increase their sending rate when discovering inconsistency while slow down their rate as the network becomes stable. The efficiency of Trickle has been approved in terms of power consumption and scalability, however, imposing the so-called listen-only period as a solution for the short-listen problem comes at the expense of increased convergence time. Thus, in this paper, an enhanced version of Trickle is proposed, namely, E-Trickle which solves the short-listen problem without imposing the listen-only period. Simulation results show that E-Trickle have decreased the convergence time by up to 43% while preserving the same efficiency of Trickle in terms of power consumption, scalability and reliability.