RPL-based Control Plane Connectivity: An Evaluation

Increasing complexity and dynamics of networks fuels an ongoing effort to increase automation of network management. As a result, concepts like intent-based and autonomic networking gain traction. But this also raises the question, how devices are on-boarded, diagnosed and recovered (e.g., because of bad configuration) with little to no intervention by human operator. A special control plane network providing connectivity between all nodes in the network, while being zero-configuration and highly resilient would therefore be beneficial. In this paper we evaluate RPL, a routing protocol originally intended for low power, lossy networks and now proposed by IETF’s ANIMA working group as one possible solution for this control plane network use case and new set of requirements. We evaluate its performance in large powerlaw topologies (up to 100 000 nodes), focussing on scalability, resilience and also adaptability to various other topologies. Our results show that the protocol in principle is able to create connectivity at this large scale, but also show potential scalability issues and longterm performance degradation.