Performance Evaluation of RPL under Mobility for VANETs

Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) has emerged as a prominent research area over the years, spurred by the increase in private transportation. Due to the distinguished characteristics such as highly dynamic topology, intermittent connectivity, constrained mobility of the nodes, variable network density, etc., VANETs possess great challenges in data communication among the nodes. This work focuses on designing a solution for various issues associated with routing in the dynamic environment of VANET. We have adopted Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) to solve the problem. RPL is a tree-based IPV6 routing standard mainly designed for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Many design aspects of RPL are suitable for dynamic network topology and are transferable to the vehicular environment. We provide an extensive evaluation of simulation performance of RPL under highly dynamic VANET. COOJA, a Contiki based simulator is used to simulate the model. The simulation results revealed that various parameters from the vehicular environment have a significant impact on the performance of the protocol. We have used latency as one of the parameters in RPL to evaluate the efficiency. The results indicate that the performance of RPL is quite appreciable in handling the challenges of data communication in VANETs.