Doing it right — Recommendations for RPL in PLC-based networks for the Smart Grid

Narrowband powerline communications are one of the core technologies for the evolution of the power grid enabling the dialogue between the power meters and the utilities. The new environment, traffic patterns and application requirements make the choice of network protocols in these networks nontrivial. In this paper, we analyse the behavior of the Contiki RPL stack, the most popular and open implementation of the IETF RPL standard. We provide evidence why the state-of-art implementations do not behave in an optimal way for Smart Grid applications and propose mechanisms and parameter selection politics that lead to improved performance during the route formation phase of the network.