Routing over Low Power and Lossy Networks protocol: Overview and performance evaluation

Abstract

The advancement of the internet of things (IoT) technologies such as wireless sensor network (WSN) have accelerated the development of routing protocols suited for low power and lossy networks (LLNs). Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a proactive dynamic routing protocol based on IPv6 with two known objective functions (OFs): Objective Function zero (OF0) and Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function (MRHOF). This paper provides an overview of this protocol with a performance study of the two OFs used in RPL. Several scenarios have been tested with 30, 60 and 120 nodes, and five parameters of comparisons were selected (Expected Transmission Count, number of hops, convergence time, power consumption and duty cycle), to our knowledge all the present works on the performance of this protocol never passed the wall of 100 nodes, and the data rate and latency were the main focus, we wanted to make a profound study by focusing on other important parameters with less focus.