UEE-RPL: A UAV-based energy efficient routing for internet of things

For Internet of Things (IoT), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be deployed at a large scale to collect and control a wide range of terminals. To enable such applications, a routing protocol is required to balance the energy load as much as possible while ensuring communication quality, as well as support emergency communications between UAVs. To this end, this article proposes an energy efficient routing protocol based on RPL for UAVs in IoT applications. This novel protocol supports two transmission modes, one is a large-scale information aggregation network, and the other is urgent point-to-point communication between UAVs. These two modes jointly organize the data transmission between nodes to meet the demand of UAV applications in IoT. As an important feature of UAV networks, a metric for energy load balance is proposed in the protocol to optimize the network performances. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol has better performance than the existing routing protocols in IoT applications.