Minimum cost load balanced multipath routing protocol for low power and lossy networks

Conventional shortest path routing mechanisms in low power and lossy networks (LLNs) impose excessive traffic load on some nodes and cause their early battery depletion. Load balancing via multipath routing is a promising solution to increase lifetime. This idea is practised by some algorithms, mostly through limited number of disjoint paths, to reduce inter-path interference. In this paper a proactive multipath routing algorithm called MRPL is proposed, based on the recent standard routing protocol for LLNs. The algorithm tries to distribute the traffic load through a set of braided paths, with the objective of maximizing the network lifetime and minimizing total transmission cost. The traffic distribution mechanism is formulated by a linear program and a heuristic method is proposed to implement it in a distributed manner. Simulation results provide enough evidence for energy and cost efficiency of the proposed routing mechanism.