Evaluation of performance of RPL and 6LOWPAN using Contiki and Cooja

Abstract

The amount of research performed in the domain of Wireless Sensor Networks has increased to enormously in recent years. The reason of this is the advancement of fabrication technology of low-power devices containing various sensors along with a wireless interface, allowing costs to be reduced. However, the deployment of large-scale sensor networks, which could consist of several thousand nodes, still represents a challenge to researchers. This project aims to evaluate the performance of routing protocols in lossy links for smart building networks. Special attention is directed towards the RPL protocol which is the IETF candidate for a standard routing protocol in wireless sensor networks. The results reveal that RPL is suitable for use in large networks (over 200 nodes) because it does not present any scalability limitations as opposed to the other protocols tested in this thesis. However, for small to medium-sized networks (less than 100 nodes), RPL’s performance does not outclass that of the other protocols that were tested. Each protocol has proven to have its strengths, thus when choosing a protocol for a wireless sensor network deployment, the decision has to be based on the specific requirements of the WSN application.