Co-RPL: RPL routing for mobile low power wireless sensor networks using Corona mechanism

Abstract

Mobility support for wireless sensor networks has always been a challenging research topic. This paper addresses the issue of mobility support in the Routing Protocol for Low power and lossy networks (RPL), the recently adopted IETF routing protocol standard for low power wireless sensor networks. RPL was originally designed for static networks, with no support for mobility. In this work, we address this gap and propose Co-RPL as an extension to RPL based on the Corona mechanism to support mobility. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Co-RPL, we conducted an extensive simulation study using the Contiki/Cooja simulator and compared the performance against standard RPL. We study the impact of node speed, packet transmission rate and number of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) roots on network performance. The simulation results show that Co-RPL decreases packet loss ratio by 45%, average energy consumption by 50% and end-to-end delay by 2.5 seconds, in comparison with the standard RPL.