Internet of Things and RPL routing protocol: A study and evaluation

Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept that is directing a huge increase in the Internet and its capability to collect, investigate and distribute data which can be turned into information or knowledge. Certain environments are proposed that are smart and self aware by direct communication between devices of various types that are part of the IoT. One category of devices such as the Low Power Lossy networks (LLNs) consists of numerous small sensors and low power devices as building block elements in IoT. The ROLL working group at Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT) has designed the Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL) which is the core of the IoT protocol stack used for communication between these low-power devices. To our knowledge experimentation and evaluation of RPL is very much needed and not much done so far. A few simulation tools exist which enable evaluation of RPL for a realistic deployment scenario. This paper focuses on understanding of the architecture and protocol stack of RPL and thereby its place in IoT. The performance of RPL is carried out for a Smart Health environment scenario by the simulations done in the Contiki OS Cooja simulator with respect to the performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio, latency, signalling overhead and energy consumption. The simulation results reveal that the RPL has shown certain suitable characteristics which may make it useful for larger scale deployments.