Abstract
In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the presence of congestion can increase the ratio of packet loss, energy inefficiency and reduction of the network throughput. Especially, this situation will be more complex in Internet of Things (IoT) environ-ments, which is composed of thousands of heterogeneous nodes. RPL is an IPv6 rout-ing protocol in low power and lossy networks standardized by IETF. However, the RPL can induce problems like frequently change parent and throughput degrade under network congestion. In this paper, we address the congestion problem between child nodes and parent nodes in RPL-enabled networks, which typically consist of low power and resource constraint devices. We use game theory strategy to design a par-ent-change procedure which decides how nodes changing their next hop node toward sink to mitigate the effect of network congestion. Comparing to the ContikiRPL im-plementation, the simulation results show that our protocol can achieve more than two times improvement in loss rate and throughput with a few average hop count increas-ing.