A Survey on Congestion Control for RPL-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

RPL (IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks) proposed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) ROLL (routing over low-power and lossy networks) working group is a de facto standard routing protocol for IoT environments. Since the standardization was proposed, RPL has been extensively improved for diverse application scenarios and environments. Congestion control is one of the most important reasons why RPL has been improved. In an LLN (low power and lossy network), congestion may even lead to network lifetime reduction. In resource-constrained networks where end-to-end congestion control is not feasible, RPL should play a more crucial role in congestion control. In this survey, we review the RPL schemes proposed for congestion control and load-balancing and discuss future research directions.