Stateless multicast forwarding with RPL in 6LowPAN sensor networks

Abstract

Abstract-Recent research efforts have resulted in efficient support for IPv6 in Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), with the "IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks" (RPL) being on the forefront as the state of the art routing approach. However, little attention has been paid to IPv6 multicast for networks of constrained devices. The "Multicast Forwarding Using Trickle" (Trickle Multicast) internet draft is one of the most noteworthy efforts, while RPL's specification also attempts to address the area but leaves many questions unanswered. In this paper we expose our concerns about the Trickle Multicast (TM) algorithm, backed up by thorough performance evaluation. We also introduce SMRF, an alternative multicast forwarding mechanism for RPL networks, which addresses TM's drawbacks. Simulation results demonstrate that SMRF achieves significant delay and energy efficiency improvements at the cost of a small increase in packet loss. We have extended the TCP/IP engine of the Contiki embedded Operating System to support both algorithms. Both implementations have been made available to the community.

IPv6 Multicast Forwarding in RPL-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

“…This paper extends our previous work [33], providing the following additional contributions: i) Extended design details for SMRF, ii) Evaluation of an additional metric: the ratio of datagrams delivered out of order by TM (sec 5.4), iii) Additional simulation experiments in a different topology for the evaluation of both algorithms on a hop-by-hop basis (sections 5.2.1, 5.3.1 and 5.5.1), iv) Results from the evaluation of both algorithms on a hardware testbed (sec. 6) and lastly v) Discussion on the code size and memory requirements for both algorithms (sec.…”

BMFA: Bi-Directional Multicast Forwarding Algorithm for RPL-based 6LoWPANs

“…More specifically, our results show that BMFA outperforms TM, in terms of reducing the end-to-end delay, design complexity, code size and energy consumption, while on the other hand, TM severely outperforms BMFA in terms of reliability. Finally, note that as documented in [6,7], the performance of multicast forwarding for all engines discussed in this paper is heavily dependent on the underlying MAC layer. For a more detailed description of possible optimizations see [6,7].…”

“…Finally, note that as documented in [6,7], the performance of multicast forwarding for all engines discussed in this paper is heavily dependent on the underlying MAC layer. For a more detailed description of possible optimizations see [6,7].…”

“…SMRF [6,7] is a multicast forwarding algorithm based on the topology information provided by RPL. Nodes participating in an RPL network exchange topology information in order to build a Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) and construct their routing tables.…”

“…SMRF is very lightweight but this comes at the cost of a severe limitation: it is only capable of forwarding traffic "downwards" in the RPL DODAG tree [6,7]. In this paper, we present a multicast forwarding algorithm called BFMA, an extended version of SMRF scheme.…”