Experimental evaluation of a routing protocol for wireless sensor networks: RPL under study

In this article, experimental results on the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) are presented. We study the RPL properties in terms of delivery ratio, control packet overhead and dynamicity. The results are obtained by several experimentations conducted in a large wireless sensor network testbed composed of more than 250 sensor nodes. In this real-life scenario (high density and convergcast traffic), several intrinsic characteristics of RPL are underlined: path length stability but reduced delivery ratio and important overhead. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study of RPL on a such large platform.