Is RPL Ready for Actuation? A Comparative Evaluation in a Smart City Scenario

Low-power wireless actuation is attracting interest in many domains, yet it is significantly less investigated than its sensing counterpart, especially in large-scale scenarios. As a consequence, guidelines about which protocol, among the few existing ones, is best suited to a given scenario are generally lacking. In this paper, we investigate the relative performance of simple dissemination- based solutions against the standard, state-of-the-art RPL protocol. These choices of protocols are motivated concretely by our involvement in the deployment of a large-scale infrastructure for smart city applications, which directly informs our evaluation, where we use the actual network topology. Our findings, albeit in a specific scenario, suggest that RPL still leaves much to be desired w.r.t. actuation. Two out of the three RPL implementations we considered exhibited unacceptable performance when used out-of-the-box. Even after some tuning and debugging, simple, dissemination-based solutions perform surprisingly better under several conditions. These findings motivate further research on the topic of large-scale low-power wireless actuation.