Stability and Efficiency of RPL under Realistic Conditions in Wireless Sensor Networks

Oana Iova (1) , Fabrice Theoleyre (1) , Thomas Noel (1)

1 ICube - Laboratoire des sciences de l'ingénieur, de l'informatique et de l'imagerie

IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is one of the the emerging routing standards for multihop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The protocol is based on the construction of a Destination-Oriented Direct Acyclic Graph (DODAG), which offers a loop-free topology to route data packets. While several metrics have been proposed in the literature, it is unclear how they perform with RPL. In this paper, we analyze the impact of different PHY and MAC metrics to the stability and the efficiency of RPL. We highlight the fact that realistic conditions lead to instabilities and oscillations in the routing structure. While minimizing the hop length leads to a stable but poor routing structure, more sophisticated link metrics such as ETX reflect more clearly the radio link quality but increase the number of DODAG reconfigurations. We also provided a detailed methodology to measure the DODAG stability and to implement efficiently each routing metric with RPL.

Mots clés: RPL; metrics; stability; oscillations; dynamic properties; WSN; ETX; minhop; LQI

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Oana Iova, Fabrice Theoleyre, Thomas Noel. Stability and Efficiency of RPL under Realistic Conditions in Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE International Symposium on Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), Sep 2013, London, United Kingdom. ⟨10.1109/PIMRC.2013.6666490⟩. ⟨hal-01206376⟩