FTmRP-NCS: Fault-Tolerant And Reliable mRPL Routing Protocol For W-NCS Communication

Abstract

The exponential rise in the demands for reliable and fault resilient communication over Wireless Network Control Systems (WNCS) across industrial monitoring and control ecosystems has alarmed academia-industries to develop more efficient wireless transmission solutions. On the other hand, the emergence of cloud-assisted Internet-of-Things (IoT) also has broadened the demands for reliable WNCS systems. To cope up with such irreplaceable needs, WNCS has exploited different wireless communication paradigms including IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power Lossy Networks (RPL) based WSN that enables reliable communication across the industrial setup to make optimal real-time process decision. However, being dynamic in nature WNCS with often undergo link-outage due to dynamic topology, node death, congestion etc. Though, a few researchers have addressed the routing problem in WNCS; however, integrating RPL with mobility to enable optimal communication has remained untouched. Additionally, no significant research addressed fault-resilient routing decision over WNCS setup, which motivates us to develop a highly robust Fault-Tolerant and Reliable mobile-RPL Routing Protocol for W-NCS (FTmRP-NCS). Unlike classical WNCS models, FTmRP-NCS employs dual objective-based routing decision by considering the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and the number of control packets required (ETX). Here, the inclusion of RSSI ensures forwarding path formation with most reliable link condition, while ETX objective function helps maintaining low control packets and hence low energy exhaustion, low redundancy and high efficiency. FTmRP-NCS applies link-sensitive mobile node movement for data gathering across WNCS, which makes overall communication more reliable as well as time-efficient. Furthermore, fault-sensitive routing decision strengthens our proposed FTmRP-NCS protocol helps WNCS to yield optimal performance. FTmRP-NCS has been applied over standard IEEE 802.15.4 protocol stack and functions in parallel to the link and network layer, which retains backward compatibility with native RPL and hence assures easy implementation with real-time WNCS environment.