Performance and route stability analysis of RPL protocol

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks are getting more deployed in dierent environment where they provide many bene ts for industrial and home automation, smart buildings, medical and environmental monitoring. Sensors are low cost devices with limited storage, computation, and power. Finding optimal based routing solutions is a challenging task in wireless sensor networks because of constraint over nodes and lossy links. The IETF Routing over Low power and Lossy network (ROLL) working group has recently developed the IPv6 based RPL routing protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). It is very important to evaluate the performance of RPL in order to make it relevant for real-world applications. Performance evaluations of RPL were already done in a simulation environment that does provide valuable results but cannot replace the real word experiments on real hardware devices. In the current implementation of RPL, Expected Transmission Count (ETX) is used as a metric to select the path from the sender nodes toward sink. Nodes select the parent with lower ETX value and changing their parent as the ETX metric has variation. This thesis aims to investigate the nodes parent changes under dierent inter-packet time intervals and transmission power with two dierent MAC layer duty cycling protocols ContikiMAC and X-MAC. In this thesis, we assess the impact of nodes parent changes on packet lost. We also investigate that based on a single metric ETX, nodes select accurate preferred parent that provide optimal path with higher packet delivery ratio. Experiments are performed on a real deployed test-bed. Experimental results reveal that the nodes in RPL based network changes their route toward the sink and frequent route changes have negative impact on the performance of sensor network.