A Green Routing Protocol with Wireless Power Transfer for Internet of Things

The usually constrained resources and lossy links scenarios of Internet of Things (IoT) applications require specific protocol suite, as the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). Due to its flexibility, RPL can support efficiently vertical applications such as environmental monitoring, smart city and Industry 4.0. In this paper, we propose a new Objective Function (OF) for RPL based on a composite metric considering jointly the residual energy of a node (parent) together with the energy that a neighbor node (child) can transfer to the parent according to the Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) concept. Specifically, we consider simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique, which enables both the energy harvesting and information decoding from the same radio frequency (RF) signal, in order to influence the selection of the best path according to the proposed energy efficient metric in RPL. Performance evaluation on a realistic scenario pointed out a remarkable energy saving to prolong the network lifetime, by selecting the best path toward the sink node, with respect to the OFs usually considered in the literature