A critical evaluation of the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL)

Thomas Heide Clausen (1) , Ulrich Herberg (1) , Matthias Philipp (1)

1 X - École polytechnique

With RPL-the "IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power Lossy Networks"-emerging as a Proposed Standard "Request For Comment" (RFC) in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) after a ∼2-year development cycle, this paper presents a critical evaluation of the resulting protocol and its applicability and limits. The paper presents a selection of observations of the protocol characteristics, exposes experiences acquired when producing a prototype implementation of RPL, and presents results obtained from testing this protocol-both in a network simulator, and in real-world experiments on a wireless sensor network testbed. The paper aims at providing a better understanding of possible weaknesses and limits of RPL, notably the possible directions that further protocol developments should explore, in order to address these.

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]

Thomas Heide Clausen, Ulrich Herberg, Matthias Philipp. A critical evaluation of the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). 2011 IEEE 7th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), Oct 2011, Wuhan, China. pp.365-372, ⟨10.1109/WiMOB.2011.6085374⟩. ⟨hal-02263413⟩