Applicability Study of RPL with Local Repair in Smart Grid Substation Networks

In this paper, a performance evaluation of the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) in a typical outdoor Smart Grid Substation Network is presented. Detailed simulations are carried out to produce several routing performance metrics using real-life scenarios. The real outdoor network was reproduced in simulation with the help of topology and link quality data gathered from the network over the time. Behaviors of such a network in presence of RPL and local repair mechanism, and potential areas of further study/improvement are pointed out. This study shows, RPL has the desired advantages of bounding control overhead and low delay. It also provides quick repair of local outage of link to root node and path quality fairly close to an optimized shortest path for an outdoor deployment.