Performance analysis of Trickle as a flooding mechanism

Thomas Heide Clausen (1) , Axel Colin de Verdière (1) , Jiazi Yi (1)

1 X - École polytechnique

"The Trickle Algorithm" is conceived as an adaptive mechanism for allowing efficient and reliable information sharing among nodes, communicating across a lossy and shared medium. Its basic principle is, for each node, to monitor transmissions from its neighbours, compare what it receives with its current state, and schedule future transmissions accordingly: if an inconsistency of information is detected, or if few or no neighbours have transmitted consistent information "recently", the next transmission is scheduled "soon"-and, in case consistent information from a sufficient number of neighbours is received, the next transmission is scheduled to be "later". Developed originally as a means of distributing firmware updates among sensor devices, this algorithm has found use also for distribution of routing information in the routing protocol RPL, standardised within the IETF for maintaining a routing topology for low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). Its use is also proposed in a protocol for multicast in LLNs, denoted "Multicast Forwarding Using Trickle". This paper studies the performance of the Trickle algorithm, as it is used in that multicast protocol.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Thomas Heide Clausen, Axel Colin de Verdière, Jiazi Yi. Performance analysis of Trickle as a flooding mechanism. 2013 15th IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology, Nov 2013, Guilin, China. pp.565-572, ⟨10.1109/ICCT.2013.6820439⟩. ⟨hal-02263391⟩