Evaluating and analyzing the performance of RPL in contiki

Abstract

To meet the development of Internet of Things (IoT), IETF has proposed IPv6 standards working under stringent low-power and low-cost constraints. However, the behavior and performance of the proposed standards have not been fully understood, especially the RPL routing protocol lying at the heart the protocol stack. In this work, we make an in-depth study on a popular implementation of the RPL (routing protocol for low power and lossy network) to provide insights and guidelines for the adoption of these standards. Specifically, we use the Contiki operating system and COOJA simulator to evaluate the behavior of the ContikiRPL implementation. We analyze the performance for different networking settings. Different from previous studies, our work is the first effort spanning across the whole life cycle of wireless sensor networks, including both the network construction process and the functioning stage. The metrics evaluated include signaling overhead, latency, energy consumption and so on, which are vital to the overall performance of a wireless sensor network. Furthermore, based on our observations, we provide a few suggestions for RPL implemented WSN. This study can also serve as a basis for future enhancement on the proposed standards.