Proactive vs. reactive multipath routing for mobility enabled RPL

Abstract

The IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) was proposed as a routing standard for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the RPL performance drastically degrade in the case of nodes' mobility. Therefore, we propose in this paper multipath routing schemes to adapt RPL to mobility scenarios. The first mobility-based braided multipath RPL (MBM-RPL) scheme establishes an alternative path braided with the primary one to replace the loose link (the up to fail link) along the first network route. The second proactive multipath mobility-based RPL (PMM-RPL) approach establishes all node disjoint routes between each node in the network and the sink. Data would not be duplicated on secondary paths until a primary path vulnerability detection. Both MBM-RPL and PMM-RPL performance are evaluated in terms of packet loss rate (PLR), average transmission delay (ADT) and the generated network overhead using the Cooja/Contiki simulation environment.