Abstract
The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a recognized standard for routing packets in low-power wireless networks. Its two popular implementations—TinyRPL and ContikiRPL—have been used for both research and commercial purposes. However, despite their wide adoption, qualitative studies of their behavior under various types of failures are essentially lacking. Therefore, in this chapter, we aim to bridge this gap in a manner that may be of interest to both researchers and practitioners. More specifically, we evaluate the two implementations of RPL in a range of link and node failure scenarios. We show that whereas the implementations handle well some classes of failures, for others they exhibit undesirable behaviors or even fail completely. The results thus identify failure scenarios handling which may require additional attention before employing the implementations in real-world dependable embedded systems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Boubekeur, F., Blin, L., Leone, R., Medagliani, P.: Bounding degrees on RPL. In: Q2SWinet ’15: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on QoS and Security for Wireless and Mobile Networks, pp. 123–130. ACM (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2815317.2815339
Brachman, A.: RPL objective function impact on LLNs topology and performance. In: 13th International Conference on Internet of Things, Smart Spaces, and Next Generation Networking, NEW2AN 2013 and 6th Conference, ruSMART 2013, St. Petersburg, Russia, 28–30 August 2013, Proceedings, pp. 340–351. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40316-3_30
Clausen, T., Herberg, U., Philipp, M.: A critical evaluation of the IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL). In: 2011 IEEE 7th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), pp. 365–372. IEEE (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/WiMOB.2011.6085374
Conta, A., Gupta, M.: Internet control message protocol (ICMPv6) for the Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) specification. RFC 4443 (2006). https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC4443
De Couto, D.S.J., Aguayo, D., Bicket, J., Morris, R.: A high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing. In: MobiCom ’03: Proceedings of the 9th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, pp. 134–146. ACM (2003). https://doi.org/10.1145/938985.939000
Dunkels, A., Gronvall, B., Voigt, T.: Contiki—a lightweight and flexible operating system for tiny networked sensors. In: 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks, pp. 455–462. IEEE (2004). https://doi.org/10.1109/LCN.2004.38
Duquennoy, S., Landsiedel, O., Voigt, T.: Let the tree bloom: scalable opportunistic routing with ORPL. In: SenSys ’13: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, pp. 2:1–2:14. ACM (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2517351.2517369
Fonseca, R., Ratnasamy, S., Zhao, J., Ee, C.T., Culler, D., Shenker, S., Stoica, I.: Beacon vector routing: scalable point-to-point routing in wireless sensornets. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, NSDI ’05, pp. 329–342. USENIX Association (2005)
Frey, H., Pind, K.: Dynamic source routing versus greedy routing in a testbed sensor network deployment. In: Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks, EWSN ’09, pp. 86–101. Springer (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00224-3_6
Gaddour, O., Koubâa, A.: RPL in a nutshell: a survey. Comput. Netw. 56(14), 3163–3178 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2012.06.016
Gaddour, O., Koubâa, A., Chaudhry, S., Tezeghdanti, M., Chaari, R., Abid, M.: Simulation and performance evaluation of DAG construction with RPL. In: Third International Conference on Communications and Networking, pp. 1–8. IEEE (2012). https://doi.org/10.1109/ComNet.2012.6217747
Gnawali, O., Levis, P.: The minimum rank with hysteresis objective function. RFC 6719 (2012). https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC6719
Han, D., Gnawali, O.: Performance of RPL under wireless interference. IEEE Commun. Mag. 51(12), 137–143 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2013.6685769
Heurtefeux, K., Menouar, H., AbuAli, N.: Experimental evaluation of a routing protocol for WSNs: RPL robustness under study. In: 2013 IEEE 9th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), pp. 491–498 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1109/WiMOB.2013.6673404
Hui, J., Vasseur, J.P.: The routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) option for carrying RPL information in data-plane datagrams. RFC 6553 (2012). https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC6553
Iova, O., Theoleyre, F., Noel, T.: Stability and efficiency of RPL under realistic conditions in wireless sensor networks. In: 2013 IEEE 24th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), pp. 2098–2102. IEEE (2013). https://doi.org/10.1109/PIMRC.2013.6666490
Istomin, T., Kiraly, C., Picco, G.P.: Is RPL ready for actuation? A comparative evaluation in a smart city scenario. In: 12th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks, EWSN 2015, Porto, Portugal, 9–11 February 2015, Proceedings, pp. 291–299. Springer International Publishing (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15582-1_22
Iwanicki, K.: RNFD: routing-layer detection of DODAG (root) node failures in low-power wireless networks. In: 2016 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pp. 13:1–13:12. IEEE (2016). https://doi.org/10.1109/IPSN.2016.7460720
Iwanicki, K., van Steen, M.: On hierarchical routing in wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, IPSN ’09, pp. 133–144. IEEE Computer Society (2009)
Iwanicki, K., van Steen, M.: A case for hierarchical routing in low-power wireless embedded networks. ACM Trans. Sens. Netw. 8(3):25:1–25:34 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2240092.2240099
Khelifi, N., Kammoun, W., Youssef, H.: Efficiency of the RPL repair mechanisms for low power and lossy networks. In: 2014 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), pp. 98–103. IEEE (2014). https://doi.org/10.1109/IWCMC.2014.6906339
Kim, Y.J., Govindan, R., Karp, B., Shenker, S.: Geographic routing made practical. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, NSDI ’05, pp. 217–230. USENIX Association (2005)
Ko, J., Eriksson, J., Tsiftes, N., Dawson-Haggerty, S., Terzis, A., Dunkels, A., Culler, D.: ContikiRPL and TinyRPL: happy together. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Extending the Internet to Low power and Lossy Networks (IP+SN 2011) (2011)
Korte, K.D., Sehgal, A., Schönwälder, J.: A study of the RPL repair process using ContikiRPL. In: Dependable Networks and Services: 6th IFIP WG 6.6 International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management, and Security, AIMS 2012, Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 4–8 June 2012, Proceedings, pp. 50–61. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30633-4_8
Levis, P., Lee, N., Welsh, M., Culler, D.: TOSSIM: Accurate and scalable simulation of entire TinyOS applications. In: SenSys ’03: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, pp. 126–137. ACM (2003). https://doi.org/10.1145/958491.958506
Levis, P., Madden, S., Polastre, J., Szewczyk, R., Whitehouse, K., Woo, A., Gay, D., Hill, J., Welsh, M., Brewer, E., Culler, D.: TinyOS: An Operating System for Sensor Networks, pp. 115–148. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-27139-2_7
Levis, P., Clausen, T., Hui, J., Gnawali, O., Jo, K.: The Trickle algorithm. RFC 6206 (2011). https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC6206
Mao, Y., Wang, F., Qiu, L., Lam, S.S., Smith, J.M.: S4: small state and small stretch routing protocol for large wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, NSDI ’07, pp. 8–8. USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA (2007)
Mohammad, M., Guo, X., Chan, M.C.: Oppcast: exploiting spatial and channel diversity for robust data collection in urban environments. In: 2016 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pp. 19:1–19:12. IEEE (2016). https://doi.org/10.1109/IPSN.2016.7460681
Narten, T., Nordmark, E., Simpson, W., Soliman, H.: Neighbor discovery for IP version 6 (IPv6). RFC 4861 (2007). https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC4861
Osterlind, F., Dunkels, A., Eriksson, J., Finne, N., Voigt, T.: Cross-level sensor network simulation with COOJA. In: Proceedings of the 2006 31st IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks, pp. 641–648. IEEE (2006). https://doi.org/10.1109/LCN.2006.322172
Radoi, I.E., Shenoy, A., Arvind, D.: Evaluation of routing protocols for Internet-enabled wireless sensor networks. In: ICWMC 2012: The Eighth International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Communications (2012)
Thubert, P.: Objective function zero for the routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL). RFC 6552 (2012). https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC6552
Tripathi, J., de Oliveira, J.C., Vasseur, J.P.: A performance evaluation study of RPL: routing protocol for low power and lossy networks. In: 2010 44th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS), pp. 1–6. IEEE (2010). https://doi.org/10.1109/CISS.2010.5464820
Vasseur, J.P., Kim, M., Pister, K., Dejean, N., Barthel, D.: Routing metrics used for path calculation in low-power and lossy networks. RFC 6551 (2012). https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC6551
Winter, T., Thubert, P., Brandt, A., Hui, J., Kelsey, R., Levis, P., Pister, K., Struik, R., Vasseur, J.P., Alexander, R.: RPL: IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks. RFC 6550 (2012). https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC6550
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Center for Research and Development (NCBR) in Poland under grant no. LIDER/434/L-6/14/NCBR/2015. K. Iwanicki was additionally supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education with a scholarship for outstanding young scientists.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Paszkowska, A., Iwanicki, K. (2019). Failure Handling in RPL Implementations: An Experimental Qualitative Study. In: Ammari, H. (eds) Mission-Oriented Sensor Networks and Systems: Art and Science. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 163. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91146-5_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91146-5_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91145-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91146-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

