Mobility support enhancement for RPL

In recent years, Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) have attracted the attention of researchers. They typically operate with strict resource constraints in communication, computation, memory, and energy. Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is an ad-hoc Distance Vector routing protocol for LLNs that adapts IPv6 and runs on top of IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Although RPL was originally designed for static topologies, for many applications mobility support has been a major requirement in LLNs. This paper focuses on addressing mobility support in RPL. We propose an enhancement based on signal strength monitoring and rank updating in order to improve the RPL performance in mobility scenarios where all nodes are moving. This enhancement helps RPL to better cope with mobility scenarios and to make faster decisions on updating next-hop neighbors. Moreover, we propose a dynamic management of control messages in order to reduce the overhead in the network. The simulation results show that our technique outperforms the standard RPL for different routing metrics.