Extending the RPL Routing Protocol to Agricultural Low Power and Lossy Networks (A-LLNs)

Abstract

The routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL) started to be designed by the ROLL working group of IETF since the year of 2008. Until the RFC6550 was released, this standard with its routing algorithms and four application scenarios, such as home and building automation, industrial control, and urban environment, have been grounded. As a main jigsaw of the paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT), RPL plays the major role and has become an impressed technical tendency in the field of wireless communication. However, it is still very difficult to find effective approaches to simulate and evaluate RPL's behaviors and other extensions of its applicability, especially in the domain of precision agriculture. Notice that wireless sensor network (WSN) has been deployed a wide variety of wireless sensing devices, and should be one valued supported part of the promising IoT ecosystem. In this paper, first the authors provide a brief presentation of the related protocols including their standardization, the existing implementations, and a group of simulation experiment results obtained from the RPL capable COOJA simulator with its developed modules. Second, the authors then focus on the utilization of this protocol in the agricultural low power and lossy network (A-LLN) area and propose their dedicated instances hybrid network architecture to meet its specific requirements. Moreover, the Web of things (WoT), a trend and new vision of IoT, is appended in the authors' proposal to provide a novel dimension in design of A-LLN since it enables a full interoperability with current web application and higher efficiency of development. As a conclusion, the authors summarized their ongoing work and future solutions of the current technology issues.

Role of IoT Technology in Agriculture: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In addition, different water, temperature, irrigation, and moisture monitoring platforms have been designed [45]. (d) Architecture: Multiple IoT agricultural architecture designed to collect the data from devices/sensors and store the collected data for proper analysis [68,72,88]. (e) Application: Mobile apps provide a connection for many IoT devices and facilitate the farmer having better control over different agricultural applications.…”

A Scalable Context-Aware Objective Function (SCAOF) of Routing Protocol for Agricultural Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPAL)

“…Thus, an efficient A-LLN routing solution can push the WSNs-based application of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in agriculture to IoT. As a proprietary type of LLN, the RPL applicability analysis of A-LLN inspired by [ 15 ] has been elaborated in [ 11 ].…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first one to extend the conventional WSN of ICT in agriculture to the concept of LLNs [ 11 ], exclusively supporting IPv6 that is main ingredient of an IoT platform. Moreover, the main purpose of this contribution is to enhance the applicability, robustness, and scalability of RPL for A-LLNs.…”

“…Meanwhile, adoption of IoT technologies in PA applications has to tackle the challenges due to the various constraints of specific WSN nodes, their deployment environment and applications. Thus, the WSN of a PA system is a Low-power and Lossy Network (LLN), and RPL [ 10 ] has been considered as a natural solution for routing issues in Agricultural LLNs (A-LLN) in our previous work [ 11 ].…”

“…According to the ROLL Working Group (WG) charter, RPL is designed as a general widespread use routing protocol, independent from the rest of the protocol stack through proposed self-organization mechanisms–topology structures. However, from the evaluations of [ 12 ] and the applicability analysis of [ 11 ], the original RPL protocol and its existing implementations cannot meet the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of real world A-LLNs deployments, such as resource constraints, transmission range, network lifetime, automatic topology adjustment and resistance of highly dynamic environment caused by obstacles, adverse weather or vegetation growth [ 13 ]. To overcome the above challenges, an optimization mechanism for RPL, introducing context-aware features ( i.e.…”