GROLL: Geographic Routing for Low Power and Lossy IoT Networks

Routing in low-power lossy networks (LLNs) remains an important research problem for Internet of Things (IoT), despite the recent standardization in RFC 6550 of RPL as an IPv6 Routing Protocol [1]. Recent deployment experiences [2] have emphasized the challenges faced by a complex design in real world deployments. One of the key challenges is versatile routing protocol design that can handle efficiently and seamlessly various combinations of routing primitives, namely unicast, multicast, and convergecast. Although RPL supports these traffic types, due to its design principle oriented around data collection, its unicast and multicast functionalities are limited. In this article, we present the design and system implementation of the first Geographic Routing framework for Low Power and Lossy Networks (GROLL). GROLL’s routing engine effectively integrates routing for unicast, multicast, and convergecast and takes into account Complex Network Topologies (CNT), i.e., network holes and cuts. GROLL detects CNTs and abstracts the boundary information of detected CNTs with significantly reduced memory size. The proposed unified routing framework was implemented on real hardware and it was evaluated extensively on a testbed of 42 TelosB motes.