Experimental Comparison of Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensors Networks: Routing Overhead and Asymmetric Links

RPL (the IETF Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) and LRP (Lightweight Routing Protocol) have in common to build a collection tree (or, more precisely, a DODAG) and "downward" host routes in the wireless sensor network. Additionally, the objective of LRP is to keep control overhead as low as possible. To substantiate this claim, we compare RPL and LRP using 40 nodes of the IoT-LAB testbed --- and the results are telling.,, We then introduce asymmetric links, which are unavoidable in most deployments, and measure their impact on the considered protocols in another set of experiments. We present the mechanisms that were introduced in LRP to deal with such cases and we report on extensive experiments involving RPL and LRP to analyze the behavior of both protocols when the links change or they exhibit asymmetry.