  Standard routing protocols for Low power and Lossy Networks are typically
designed to optimize bottom-up data flows, by maintaining a cycle-free network
topology. The advantage of such topologies is low memory footprint to store
routing information (only the parent's address needs to me known by each node).
The disadvantage is that other communication patterns, like top-down and
bidirectional data flows, are not easily implemented. In this work we propose
MHCL: IPv6 Multihop Host Configuration for Low-Power Wireless Networks. MHCL
employs hierarchical address allocation that explores cycle-free network
topologies and aims to enable top-down data communication with low message
overhead and memory footprint. We evaluated the performance of MHCL both
analytically and through simulations. We implemented MHCL as a subroutine of
RPL protocol on Contiki OS and showed that it significantly improves top-down
message delivery in RPL, while using a constant amount of memory (i.e.,
independent of network size) and being efficient in terms of setup time and
number of control messages.
