The Internet of Things vision foresees billions of
devices to connect the physical world to the digital world. Sensing
applications such as structural health monitoring, surveillance or
smart buildings employ multi-hop wireless networks with high
density to attain sufficient area coverage. Such applications need
networking stacks and routing protocols that can scale with
network size and density while remaining energy-efficient and
lightweight. To this end, the IETF RoLL working group has
designed the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy
Networks (RPL). This paper discusses the problems of link quality
estimation and neighbor management policies when it comes
to handling high densities. We implement and evaluate different
neighbor management policies and link probing techniques in
Contiki’s RPL implementation. We report on our experience
with a 100-node testbed with average 40-degree density. We show
the sensitivity of high density routing with respect to cache sizes
and routing metric initialization. Finally, we devise guidelines for
design and implementation of density-scalable routing protocols