Experimental evaluation of a Routing Protocol for WSNs: RPL robustness under study

This paper presents experimental results on the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). The RPL properties in terms of delivery ratio, control packet overhead, dynamics and robustness are studied. The results are obtained by several experimentations conducted on 2 large wireless sensor network testbeds composed of more than 100 sensor nodes each. In this real-life scenario (high density and convergecast traffic), several intrinsic characteristics of RPL are underlined: path length stability but reduced delivery ratio and important overhead. To investigate the RPL robustness, we observe its behavior when facing a sudden death of several sensors and when several sensors are redeployed. RPL shows good abilities to maintain the routing process despite such events. However, the paper highlights that this ability can be reduced if only few critical nodes fail. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study of RPL on such large platform.