Performance assessment and tuning rules for low-power and lossy stacks

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is having a great impact on the specifications of Low-power and Lossy stacks, especially in IEEE and IETF bodies. In fact, emerging standards present a mix of technological and architectural features to boost a wide deployment of the IoT. At the same time, such novel proposals require a thorough evaluation to discover pros and cons, and to ameliorate their performance. To this end, we present herein a preliminary performance assessment of the novel IETF RPL routing protocol, when jointly used with different kinds of MAC layers. Our results clearly show that the interaction between routing and MAC protocols can produce subtle effects that greatly affect the system performance. This implies the need of further research efforts to discover how to set the parameters of the stack and to optimize the system behavior.