A Comprehensive Review for RPL Routing Protocol in Low Power and Lossy Networks

Abstract

Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) are composed of a large number of nodes which are characterized by limited resources (like energy, memory, processing power, and bandwidth. These nodes are interconnected by lossy links. Therefore, they support low data rates. This leads to an unstable state with relatively low rates of packet delivery. In the beginning 2008, the Internet Engineering team (IETF) working team, named ROLL, investigates to use the existing routing protocol for LLNs, but they found that these protocols were not sufficiently appropriate for LLNs. Due to the important role of the LLNs in the Internet of Things (IoTs), ROLL standardizes a routing solution called IPv6 for LLNs. Therefore, ROLL began to design a new protocol based on IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks named (RPL). It is an IPv6 routing protocol specifically designed for low power and lossy networks (LLN) compliant with the 6LoWPAN protocol. RPL has gained a lot of maturities. It is attracting increasing interest in the research community. RPL is flexible in building the topology. It constructs a topology proactively. Due to the absence of a fully comprehensive review about RPL drive us to introduce this article. Furthermore, this article investigates the most related studies obtained about RPL routing protocol that concern to its implementation, performance, applications evaluation, and improvement. An open research challenges on the RPL design are pointed out. Finally, this survey can support researchers to further understand the RPL and participate to further improve it in the future research works.