The role of the RPL routing protocol for smart grid communications

Advanced communication/networking technologies should be integrated in next-generation power systems (a.k.a. smart grids) to improve their resilience, efficiency, adaptability, and sustainability. Many believe that the smart grid communication infrastructure will emerge from the interconnection of a large number of small-scale networks organized into a hierarchical architecture covering larger geographic areas. In this article, first we carry out a thorough analysis of the key components of the smart grid communication architecture, discussing the different network topologies and communication technologies that could be employed. Special emphasis is given to the advanced metering infrastructure, which will be used to interconnect the smart meters deployed at customers\u27 premises with data aggregators and control centers. The design of scalable, reliable, and efficient networking solutions for AMI systems is an important research problem because these networks are composed of thousands of resource-constrained embedded devices usually interconnected with communication technologies that can provide only low-bandwidth and unreliable links. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks was recently standardized by the IETF to specifically meet the requirements of typical AMI applications. In this article we present a thorough overview of the protocol, and we critically analyze its advantages and potential limits in AMI applications. We also conduct a performance evaluation of RPL using a Contiki-based prototype of the RPL standard and a network emulator. Our results indicate that although average performance may appear reasonable for AMI networks, a few RPL nodes may suffer from severe unreliability issues and experience high packet loss rates due to the selection of suboptimal paths with highly unreliable links

Route or Flood? Reliable and Efficient Support for Downward Traffic in RPL

International audienc

A hybrid objective function with empirical stability aware to improve RPL for IoT applications

The diverse applications of the internet of things (IoT) require adaptable routing protocol able to cope with several constraints. Thus, RPL protocol was designed to meet the needs for IoT networks categorized as low power and lossy networks (LLN). RPL uses an objective function based on specific metrics for preferred parents selection through these packets are sent to root. The single routing metric issue generally doesn’t satisfy all routing performance requirements, whereas some are improved others are degraded. In that purpose, we propose a hybrid objective function with empirical stability aware (HOFESA), implemented in the network layer of the embedded operating system CONTIKI, which combines linearly three weighty metrics namely hop count, RSSI and node energy consumption. Also, To remedy to frequent preferred parents changes problems caused by taking into account more than one metric, our proposal relies on static and empirical thresholds. The designed HOFESA, evaluated under COOJA emulator against Standard-RPL and EC-OF, showed a packet delivery ratio improvement, a decrease in the power consumption, the convergence time and DIO control messages as well as it gives network stability through an adequate churn

TFUZZY-OF: a new method for routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks load balancing using multi-criteria decision-making

The internet of things (IoT) based on a network layer perspective includes low-power and lossy networks (LLN) that are limited in terms of power consumption, memory, and energy usage. The routing protocol used in these networks is called routing over low-power and lossy networks (RPL). Therefore, the IoT networks include smart objects that need multiple routing for their interconnections which makes traffic load balancing techniques indispensable to RPL routing protocol. In this paper, we propose a method based on fuzzy logic and the technique for the order of prioritization by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) as a well-known multi-criteria decision-making method to solve the load balancing problem by routing metrics composition. For this purpose, a combination of both link and node routing metrics namely hop count, expected transmission count, and received signal strength indicator is used. The results of simulations show that this method can increase the quality of services in terms of packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay

A New Objective Function Based on Additive Combination of Node and Link Metrics as a Mechanism Path Selection for RPL Protocol

Since its development by IETF, the IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) remains the subject of several researches. RPL is based on objective function as a mechanism selection of paths in the network. However, the default objective functions standardized selects the routes according to a single routing metric that leads to an unoptimized path selection and a lot of parent changes. Thus, we propose in this paper weighted combined metrics objective function (WCM-OF) and non-weighted combined metrics objective function (NWCM-OF) that are based both on additive link quality and energy metrics with equal weights or not to achieve a tradeoff between reliability and saved energy levels. The proposed objective functions were implemented in the core of Contiki operating system and evaluated with Cooja emulator. Results show that the proposed objective functions improved the network performances compared to default objective functions

A critical analysis of mobility management related issues of wireless sensor networks in cyber physical systems

Mobility management has been a long-standing issue in mobile wireless sensor networks and especially in the context of cyber physical systems; its implications are immense. This paper presents a critical analysis of the current approaches to mobility management by evaluating them against a set of criteria which are essentially inherent characteristics of such systems on which these approaches are expected to provide acceptable performance. We summarize these characteristics by using a quadruple set of metrics. Additionally, using this set we classify the various approaches to mobility management that are discussed in this paper. Finally, the paper concludes by reviewing the main findings and providing suggestions that will be helpful to guide future research efforts in the area

Performance analysis of Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) in large scale networks

With growing needs to better understand our environments, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) is gaining importance among information and communication technologies. IoT will enable billions of intelligent devices and networks, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), to be connected and integrated with computer networks. In order to support large scale networks, IETF has defined the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) to facilitate the multi-hop connectivity. In this paper, we provide an in-depth review of current research activities. Specifically, the large scale simulation development and performance evaluation under various objective functions and routing metrics are pioneering works in RPL study. The results are expected to serve as a reference for evaluating the effectiveness of routing solutions in large scale IoT use cases

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte