Experimental evaluation of a routing protocol for wireless sensor networks: RPL under study

Abstract

In this article, experimental results on the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) are presented. We study the RPL properties in terms of delivery ratio, control packet overhead and dynamicity. The results are obtained by several experimentations conducted in a large wireless sensor network testbed composed of more than 250 sensor nodes. In this real-life scenario (high density and convergcast traffic), several intrinsic characteristics of RPL are underlined: path length stability but reduced delivery ratio and important overhead. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study of RPL on a such large platform.

ERPL: An Enhanced Peer-to-Peer Routing Mechanism for Low-Power and Lossy Networks

“…After the analysis, the article concludes that to remain a viable option in the IoT domain, RPL needs improvement especially in P2P communications to support emerging IoT use cases. Experimental performance evaluation of RPL using hop-count and/or ETX routing metrics is presented in [6], [7], [8], and RPL performance evaluation for multi-gateway networks using different objective functions is presented in [9]. To reactively discover P2P communication paths, enhancements for RPL are proposed in [10] and [11].…”

RPL Routing Protocol Performance in Smart Grid Applications Based Wireless Sensors: Experimental and Simulated Analysis

“…If RPL proposed a high-density network application, which requires low latency like medical monitoring applications, it is recommended to apply OF0, which basically depend on the number of hops to calculate the routing routes as it experiences lower latency than ETX. To be fair, we choose from literature some related work [7,9,12,17] that evaluate RPL protocol using operating system Contiki like our study and based WSN environment in terms of routing metrics and targeting many different platforms and scenarios to test RPL applicability in AMI applications. We compare our RPL evaluations using the experimental network and simulated network with these related works and find that we measured RPL performance using two important objective functions (OF0 and ETX) in terms of four routing metrics (overhead, latency, PDR and power consumption).…”

“…Their evaluation does not reflect anything about RPL behavior in dense networks or the effectiveness of network physical topology. Heurtefeux et al [9] evaluate RPL in uniform topology and their results showed that RPL overhead is very high, while they mentioned that RPL performance is not affected by the physical topology. In Hakeem et al [17] this implementation used hop count to find the best path in medium scale network.…”

“…Generally, [8] mentioned that RPL control messages especially DODAG Advertisement message (DAO) messages may be result in network congestions. In [9], the authors investigated RPL's behavior in high density network: They find that RPL protocol guarantees a stable path, however, the physical network topology instability showed that RPL PDR is very low in dense networks. They used an indoor topology with 100 nodes on Lille SensLAB [10] testbed and they conducted experiments to prove that RPL protocol is an efficient routing protocol to find the shortest routes to destinations even in a large-scale network.…”

RPL-based routing protocols for multi-sink wireless sensor networks

“…Since RPL allows different metrics, we use it to evaluate the different metrics' performances. The performance of RPL itself has been evaluated in single-sink WSNs in [20], [21], [22] mostly using the hop-count and/or ETX metrics, and RPL is used for multi-sink WSN in [23], however there does not exist research work that evaluates RPL in a multi-sink WSN with different metrics and OFs. Hence, in this paper we present and evaluate different RPL-based routing protocols using different metrics and OFs in multi-sink WSNs.…”