Five-Nines Reliable Downward Routing in RPL

Abstract: After a decade of research in low-power data collection, reaching arbitrary nodes has received comparatively little attention. The leading protocol for low-power IPv6 routing, RPL, is no exception, as it is often studied in multipoint-to-point scenarios. As a result, downward routing (from root to node) is still notoriously difficult, holding back the emergence of Internet of Things applications that involve actuation. In this paper, we focus on achieving industrial-grade reliability levels (1e-5 failure rate) in downward routing with RPL. We make every packet count, and classify the different causes of packet loss. We show how to mitigate each source of packet loss, by (1) introducing a gradient metric that favors reliable links, (2) increasing neighborhood awareness for accurate link selection, and (3) ensuring a robust routing state maintenance and packet forwarding. We demonstrate RPL downward routing with loss rates in the order of 1e-5 in four different testbeds up to 352 nodes, in both sparse and dense settings. We also validate our solution on top of a low-power TSCH scheduler, and achieve sub-percent low duty cycles and a channel utilization of 0.07% at every node, spread over 16 channels.