Quality of Service Support in RPL Networks: Standing State and Future Prospects

The development of IP-based Internet of Things (IoT) networks would facilitate more effective end-to-end IP network architectures, but it remains a challenge. Network routing needs to be effectively addressed in the IoT environments of scarce computational and energy resources. Accordingly, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has specified the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Network (RPL) to provide a bespoke IPv6-based routing framework for IoT networks. However, RPL comes with no Quality of Service (QoS) support which is an essential requirement for many IoT applications. The network research community has introduced a number of research proposals enhancing RPL with different QoS solutions. This paper presents a review of these proposed solutions and aims to establish a firm understanding of recent QoS developments for RPL and possible areas for future IoT routing research. The focus is on comprehending the protocol and networking properties that can affect QoS performance in RPL networks. Consideration is also given to different objective functions developed for addressing varying QoS aspects such as throughput, delay, and packet loss. RPL is also extended in a number of QoS solutions following different approaches at the MAC, network, and application layers. However, there is still a need for further developments to address effective QoS support, particularly for dynamic RPL networks.