Performance Evaluation of RPL Over TDMA‐Based Access Control Scheme in Large‐Scale Wireless Multi‐Hop Networks

ABSTRACT In recent years, large‐scale wireless multi‐hop networks have been established for smart cities. These network systems collect various data from hundreds of nodes. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low‐Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is widely used for building large‐scale wireless multi‐hop networks. However, previous studies have pointed out that the routing overhead of RPL is significantly high. With an increase in nodes, there is a tendency for the overhead of control messages to rise, which may lead to a decrease in data collection rates due to radio interference between nodes. Moreover, since the radio propagation characteristics in real environments are not uniform, so there are concerns that in poor radio conditions, the retransmission of control messages could locally increase traffic load. To address this issue and allow for flexible adjustment of RPL's routing overhead, we propose to run RPL over Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based access control scheme. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we conducted field experiments of a large‐scale wireless multi‐hop network and report the results in this paper.