Performance Evaluation of Mobility-Aware Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a class of low power and Lossy networks (LLN) which are useful to monitor a physical/environmental phenomenon. The Routing Protocol for Low Power and lossy networks (RPL) is a standardized protocol specifically designed to route the data over LLN networks. In particular, to take into account the specific features of LLN the RPL protocol computes the best routes following one or several metrics (e.g., the residual energy of nodes or the link quality) based on the state of the nodes (a.k.a sensors) or links. Nevertheless, RPL was originally designed to handle static networks; when node(s) move(s), the performances of RPL drop down. This issue has motivated a great deal of interest in ensuring that sensors may route the sensing data even thought they move from place to place, establishing new links and moving away from the previously established links. In this paper, we present RPL and the solutions that permit to deal with mobile nodes. We introduce a simulation-based evaluation of these solutions, which is focused on the energy consumption and the packet losses. The comparison between RPL and MRPL shows that RPL consumes less energy due to many packet losses. In counterpart, RPL does not provide a continuous connectivity to mobile sensor contrary to MRPL that keeps connection.