A Performance Evaluation of RPL in Contiki

Abstract: A Wireless Sensor Network is formed of several small devices encompassing the capability of sensing a physical characteristic and sending it hop by hop to a central node via low power and short range transceivers. The Sensor network lifetime strongly depends on the routing protocol in use. Routing protocol is responsible for forwarding the traffic and making routing decisions. If the routing decisions made are not intelligent, more re-transmissions will occur across the network which consumes limited resources of the wireless sensor network like energy, bandwidth and processing. Therefore a careful and extensive performance analysis is needed for the routing protocols in use by any wireless sensor network. In this study we investigate Objective Functions and the most influential parameters on Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Network (RPL) performance in Contiki (WSN OS) and then evaluate RPL performance in terms of Energy, Latency, Packet Delivery Ratio, Control overhead, and Convergence Time for the network. We have carried out extensive simulations yielding a detailed analysis of different RPL parameters with respect to the five performance metrics. The study provides an insight into the different RPL settings suitable for different application areas. Experimental results show ETX is a better objective, and that ContikiRPL provides very efficient network Convergence (14s), Control traffic overhead (1300 packets), Energy consumption (1.5% radio on time), Latency (0.5s), and Packet Delivery Ratio (98%) in our sample RPL simulation of one hour with 80 nodes, after careful configuration of DIO interval minimum/doublings, Radio duty cycling, and Frequency of application messages.