In a real network deployment, the diverse sensor applications generate a heterogeneous traffic pattern which may include basic sensing measurements such as temperature readings or high-volume multimedia traffic. In a heterogeneous traffic network, the two standardized objective functions (OFs), i.e., objective function zero (OF0) and the Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function (MRHOF) for routing protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) perform poor routing decisions by selecting an already congested parent node and cause more re-transmissions across the network. Therefore, careful consideration is required in designing a new OF for heterogeneous traffic scenarios. In this study, we examine the RPL protocol under a heterogeneous traffic pattern and proposed a new protocol based on queue and workload-based condition (QWL-RPL). The aim of the proposed protocol is to achieve a reliable path with better overall performance. The proposed OF model considers the link workload in addition to mapping the congestion status of the node using the packet queue. We implement the proposed routing model in the Contiki operating system (OS) Cooja environment to compare with the existing technique. The simulation results show that QWL-RPL can improve the performance of a heterogeneous traffic network as compared with both OF0 and MRHOF, specifically in terms of the amount of overhead, packets reception ratio (PRR), average delay, and jitter. Final results indicate that on average, there is a 5%–30% improvement in PRR, 25%–45% reduction in overheads, 12%–30% reduction in average delay, and 20%–40% reduction in jitter.
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