RPL at Scale: Experiences from a Performance Evaluation on up to 700 IEEE 802.15.4 Devices

The scalability of the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is increasingly attracting the interest of both academia and industry. In light of this, we present experiences from a pilot experimental study conducted over several weeks on the protocol’s state-of-the-art implementation, RPL-Lite, in a large multi-hop IEEE 802.15.4 network of up to 700 nodes dispersed over 3390 m
²
. Our results show that RPL is capable of reliable and self-managed data collection even in such large-scale deployments, but its performance may drop significantly because of transmission power settings, border router locations, and insufficient load balancing, notably due to a phenomenon that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been reported in literature. We believe that our observations can be of value to designers and administrators of low-power wireless networks as well as to the community developing RPL.