A comparative performance study of the routing protocols RPL, LOADng and LOADng-CTP with bidirectional traffic for AMI scenario

TL;DR

This paper compares the performance of RPL, LOADng, and LOADng-CTP routing protocols in smart metering scenarios, evaluating control overhead, delay, and packet delivery for different traffic types in low power networks.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparative analysis of RPL, LOADng, and an extended LOADng-CTP protocol specifically for smart metering applications in AMI.

Findings

LOADng-CTP improves data collection efficiency.

RPL shows lower control overhead in P2MP traffic.

LOADng variants perform better in certain delay metrics.

Abstract

With the introduction of the smart grid, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) has become a main component in the present power system. The effective implementation of AMI depends widely on its communication infrastructure and protocols providing trustworthy two-way communications. In this paper we study two routing protocols philosophies for low power and lossy networks (LLNs) and their application for a smart metering scenario. This study purposes a detailed evaluation of two routing protocols proposed by IETF the proactive candidate namely RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) and the reactive candidate named LOADng (LLN On-demand Ad-hoc Distance vector routing protocol - next generation) recently proposed as an Internet Draft, still in its design phase and is part of the ITU-T G.9903 recommendation. In the course of this study, we also implemented an extension version of LOADng named LOADng-CTP specified by an IETF draft extended with a collection tree for efficient data acquisition in LLNs. We performed checks on control overhead; End to End Delay and Packet delivery ratio for the two protocols related to multipoint-to-point (MP2P), and point-to-multi point (P2MP) traffic flow in a realistic smart metering architecture.