Paper: Performance analysis of Trickle as a flooding mechanism

“The Trickle Algorithm” is conceived as an adaptive mechanism for allowing efficient and reliable information sharing among nodes, communicating across a lossy and shared medium. Its basic principle is, for each node, to monitor transmissions from its neighbours, compare what it receives with its cur- rent state, and schedule future transmissions accordingly: if an inconsistency of information is detected, or if few or no neighbours have transmitted consistent information “recently”, the next transmission is scheduled “soon” – and, in case consistent information from a sufficient number of neighbours is received, the next transmission is scheduled to be “later”.

Developed originally as a means of distributing firmware updates among sensor devices, this algorithm has found use also for distribution of routing information in the routing protocol RPL, standardised within the IETF for maintaining a routing topology for low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). Its use is also proposed in a protocol for multicast in LLNs, denoted “Multicast Forwarding Using Trickle”. This paper studies the performance of the Trickle algorithm, as it is used in that multicast protocol.

In Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology, 2013. – PDFhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICCT.2013.6820439