Objective function: A key contributor in Internet of Things primitive properties

With the widespread use of Internet of Things (IoT) in every aspect of human's daily life, communications of such an enormous amount of existing embedded devices in these systems arise many new challenges from power consumption, performance, and reliability perspectives. Communications in an IoT infrastructure are managed by a set of policies which are determined by Objective Functions (OFs). Thus, OFs are the most important contributors in facing with the mentioned challenges. In this paper, due to the lack of information on how OFs affect the primary properties of an IoT infrastructure, we have compared three well-known OFs (OF0, MRHOF, and OFFL) from power consumption, performance, and reliability perspectives. This paper would pave the way for scholars to realize which of the three mentioned areas are more affected by OFs. Our evaluation results on Contiki's IoT simulation environment (COOJA) illustrate, OFs could affect the power consumption by up to 71.2%, while their impacts on reliability and performance would be as high as 77.5% and 25.15%, respectively.