RPL Objective Functions and Cross-Layer Energy-Efficient Design for the Internet of Things

K. Vaidegi, D. Karthika

Abstract: The Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the de-facto standard for constructing routing topologies in resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor network (WSN) deployments. Because RPL's behaviour is largely determined by its Objective Function (OF), a substantial body of research has examined how different metrics- hop count, expected transmission count (ETX), residual energy, bandwidth, congestion and quality-of-service (QoS) indicators- shape path selection, energy consumption and network lifetime. A parallel line of work has argued that single-layer optimisation is insufficient for severely constrained devices and has proposed cross-layer designs that jointly consider the physical, medium access control (MAC), network and application layers. This paper reviews and synthesises eighteen recent studies spanning three related themes: (i) the design and comparative evaluation of RPL objective functions, (ii) cross-layer architectures for energy-efficient routing in IoT and WSNs, and (iii) metaheuristic and machine-learning-based optimisation of energy usage and routing decisions. The review identifies recurring trade-offs between energy efficiency, latency, control overhead and QoS, highlights the growing role of cross-layer and learning-based methods in addressing these trade-offs, and outlines open research directions, including standardised benchmarking, security-aware objective functions and lightweight machine-learning integration for constrained devices.

Keywords: RPL routing, Low power IoT networks, Cross layer routing, Energy efficient routing, Wireless sensor networks

How to Cite?: K. Vaidegi, D. Karthika, "RPL Objective Functions and Cross-Layer Energy-Efficient Design for the Internet of Things", Volume 15 Issue 8, August 2026, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 644-647, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR26806123655, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR26806123655

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