CREST: An epoch-oriented routing control plane for Low-Power and Lossy Networks

There has been much recent interest in deploying IP-enabled routing and management protocols within Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLN). For instance, the Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL) forms a directed acyclic graph from which a routing tree can be selected. RPL is designed to dynamically modify routes in response to varying network conditions. However, many performance-sensitive LLN applications require stable routing trees with fixed homogeneous or heterogeneous transmission rates over defined time intervals. For these applications we introduce the CREST: Coordinated Routing for Epoch-based Stable Tree framework. CREST provides a LLN and IP-friendly routing control plane for supporting this application class. CREST is designed to supplement, rather than replace, LLN routing protocols such as RPL or CTP. We describe our implementation of CREST in the Contiki operating system. We also present a performance analysis for a utility maximization application using the framework comparing epoch-based protocols to an RPL approach. Our results show that the epoch-based protocols consistently deliver higher utility levels.