Sharing is caring: a cooperation scheme for RPL network resilience and efficiency

International audienceThe IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) builds a Direction Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) rooted at one node.This node may act as a border router to provide Internet connectivity to the members of the DODAG but such a situation creates a single point of failure.Upon border router failure, all nodes connected to the DODAG are affected as all ongoing communications are instantly broken and no new communications can be initiated.Moreover, nodes close to the border router should forward traffic from farther nodes in addition to their own, which may cause congestion and energy depletion inequality.In this article we specify a full solution to enable border router redundancy in RPL networks.To achieve this, we propose a mechanism leveraging cooperation between colocated RPL networks.It enables failover to maintain Internet connectivity and load balancing to improve the overall energy consumption and bandwidth.Our contribution has been implemented in Contiki OS and was evaluated through experiments performed on the FIT IoT-LAB testbed