Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector Routing - Next Generation (LOADng): Protocol, extension, and applicability

Abstract This paper studies the routing protocol “Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector Routing Protocol – Next Generation (LOADng)”, designed to enable efficient, scalable and secure routing in low power and lossy networks. As a reactive protocol, it does not maintain a routing table for all destinations in the network, but initiates a route discovery to a destination only when there is data to be sent to that destination to reduce routing overhead and memory consumption. Designed with a modular approach, LOADng can be extended with additional components for adapting the protocol to different topologies, traffic, and data-link layer characteristics. This paper studies several such additional components for extending LOADng: support for smart route requests and expanding ring search, an extension permitting maintaining collection trees, a fast rerouting extension. All those extensions are examined from the aspects of specification, interoperability with other mechanisms, security vulnerabilities, performance and applicability. A general framework is also proposed to secure the routing protocol.