Experimental evaluation of RPL protocol

RPL is a routing protocol for low power and lossy networks. It is an extensible proactive IPv6 distance vector protocol, which is a brand new proposed standard for including low power and lossy networks in the global realm of IPv6 networks. RPL has been implemented and tested in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) simulations with up to a thousand nodes. Recently, some of the research process has studied the operation of the protocol experimentally in small networks, which is not enough to illustrate the whole features of RPL. So, it is important to implement real large scenarios. In this paper, we present an experimental performance evaluation of RPL for different network settings to understand the impact of the protocol attributes on the network behavior, namely in terms of convergence time, energy, packet loss and packet delay.