Is RPL Ready for Actuation? A Comparative Evaluation in a Smart City Scenario

Abstract. This paper introduces the problem of high precision control in constrained wireless cyber-physical systems. We argue that balancing conflicting performance objectives, namely energy e ciency, high reliability and low latency, whilst concurrently enabling data collection and targeted message dissemination, are critical to the success of future applications of cyber-physical systems that leverage networks of constrained wireless devices. We describe the contemporary art in practical collection and dissemination techniques, and select the most applicable for evaluation. A comprehensive simulation study is presented, the results of which show that the current art falls significantly short of desirable performance when inter-packet intervals decrease to those required for precision control. It follows that there is a significant need for further study and new solutions to solve this emerging problem.

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“…The noise floor was set to 90dBm with a standard deviation of 2dBm. These values were shown to be realistic for low noise environments in [9].…”

Section: Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar questions have attracted increased attention in the recent literature, e.g. in [9,10] 2 and [19]. Perhaps equally important are the questions: can both collect and control tra c types e↵ectively coexist in a full network stack, what is the relationship between them, and what are the inherent trade-o↵s?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Precision Control in Constrained Wireless Cyber-Physical Systems

Boyle

Kolcun

Yeatman

2016

Internet of Things. IoT Infrastructures

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“…Moreover, the RPL standard does not specify the action to take after a parent refuses to install a new downward route (e.g., because its routing table is full), therefore undermining the reliability of downward traffic. We recently analyzed the problem in our own work, where we focused on emulation of the Contiki RPL implementation over realistic topologies taken from a smart city deployment [12]. Figure 3 illustrates the problem: the reliability of downward traffic (e.g., for actuation) decreases severely as soon as the size of the network approaches the size of the routing table, which we set to 50 entries-the maximum allowed on TMote Sky, as already discussed.…”

Section: Scalabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

RPL: The Routing Standard for the Internet of Things... Or Is It?

et al. 2016

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Abstract-RPL, the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks, is considered the de facto routing protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). Since its standardization, RPL contributed to the advancement of communications in the world of tiny, embedded, networking devices, by providing, along with other standards, a baseline architecture for IoT. Several years later, we analyze the extent to which RPL lived up to the expectations defined by the IETF requirements, and tie our analysis to current trends, identifying the challenges RPL must face to remain on the forefront of IoT technology.

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“…Therefore, the route discovered is the shortest path in a tree. However, a recent study by Istomin et al (2015) showed that RPL is not ready to handle P2P communication required in actuation networks and its strength lies in its collection capabilities [28].…”

Section: A Routing Table Discoverymentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Distributed Query Processing

Kolcun

Boyle

McCann

2016

IEEE Trans. Automat. Sci. Eng.

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Abstract-A variety of wireless networks, including applications of Wireless Sensor Networks, Internet of Things, Cyberphysical Systems, etc., increasingly pervade our homes, retail, transportation systems and manufacturing processes. Traditional approaches communicate data from all sensors to a central system, and users (humans or machines) query this central point for results, typically via the web. As the number of deployed sensors, thus generated data streams, is increasing exponentially, this traditional approach may no longer be sustainable, or desirable in some application contexts. Therefore, new approaches are required to allow users to directly interact with the network, for example requesting data directly from sensor nodes. This is difficult, as it requires every node to be capable of point-to-point routing, in addition to identifying a subset of nodes that can fulfil a user's query. This paper presents DRAGON, a platform that allows any node in the network to identify all nodes that satisfy user queries, i.e. request data from nodes, and relay the result to the user. The DRAGON platform achieves this in a fully distributed way. No central orchestration is required, network overheads are low, and latency is improved over existing comparable methods. DRAGON is evaluated on networks of various topologies and different network densities. It is compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms based on summary trees, like Innet and SENS-Join. DRAGON is shown to outperform these approaches up to 88% in terms of network traffic required, also a proxy for energy efficiency, and 84% in terms of processing delay. Note to Practitioners:Abstract-This work is motivated by the continuing deluge of constrained, wirelessly connected sensing and control devices. Networks of communicable sensors and actuators are finding increased applicability across a range of industries and application scenarios. They are often thought of as a subset of the Internet of Things. However, due to the inherent difficulty in building theses systems, technically and in terms of balancing the trade-offs between (economic) cost and performance (energy, latency, reliability, determinism), uptake has been slow. The community is relatively small, and therefore has not overcome all of the problems that present themselves considering required functionality of industrial applications. There is a need to find find new ways to interact with these devices, particularly those with heterogeneous attributes. There is also clear motivation to progress from traditional system architectures, whereby all data sensed are transmitted to centralised storage and management platform, to decentralised means of interrogation and control. This work proposes a solution to this problem, describing and evaluating a novel framework to query constrained networked devices based on two key improvements over the current art. The first is construction and management of a dynamic routing mechanism that facilitates the second; a method to store static attributes in a distributed m...

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Is RPL Ready for Actuation? A Comparative Evaluation in a Smart City Scenario

Cited by 22 publications

References 10 publications

Towards Precision Control in Constrained Wireless Cyber-Physical Systems

Towards Precision Control in Constrained Wireless Cyber-Physical Systems

RPL: The Routing Standard for the Internet of Things... Or Is It?

Efficient Distributed Query Processing

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