Energy efficiency impact of transient node failures when using RPL
Ulf Kulau, Silas Müller, Sebastian Schildt, Arthur Martens, Felix Büsching, Lars Christian Wolf · 2017
The Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a wide-spread, flexible routing protocol specifically designed for energy-constrained networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The resilience of RPL has been verified in several existing evaluations, but how a simple node reset can impact the energy efficiency has not been investigated so far. Thus, in this paper we examine the energy costs of transient node failures in a RPL network. We show that such temporary node failures can have a significant impact on the network's total energy usage. As transient node failures are common in WSNs this work reveals an important weakness of RPL which can even be exploited for attacks.