Analysing the Performance of RPL Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Traffic in Constrained Environments

IoT or the Internet-of-things is a dynamic branch in the network communications and information domain. Despite the ubiquity of networking technology over the last couple of years, the devices have been vastly restricted to end-user devices. Recently, we have witnessed a wider range of devices beyond this bracket using IoT. With the increase in usage of these IoT devices, it becomes essential to understand the working and performance of the protocols supporting such devices. The networks of IoT devices are generally low-power and lossy (LLNs). These are the networks where the resources are highly constrained. The lossy and unstable links support only low data rates. Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy-networks (RPL) for LLNs is a popular IPv6 routing protocol. In this paper, RPL performance has been studied in various network constraints - single-sink and multi-sinks network, sparse and dense networks, change in the reception ratios of the sinks and sender nodes, and different objective functions of RPL, OF0 and MRHOF. The paper aims to understand the functionality of RPL in differing environments with hierarchical network structures or topology. We also discuss how a heterogeneous network in constrained environments affects the two important performance metrics - Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and Total Control Messages.