Impact of Network Topologies on RPL Performance

The Internet of Things network topology paradigm defined as Low energy Lossy Network. The commonly used routing protocol in this network is RPL. This RPL protocol has Objective Functions which used to determine the route from the sender to the root node or border router. The most commonly used objective functions are OF0 which is called Objective Function Zero and MRHOF which is called Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function. The contribution of this work is to investigate the employment of both RPL objective functions by arranging the nodes in different topologies such as a tree, ring, grid, linear and random. Furthermore, RPL performance was measured and observed by the change in packet delivery ratio, delay, overhead, and convergence time. Testing and evaluation are conducted by the Cooja simulator in Contiki. The observations showed that there exists a relationship between network topology and the performance of RPL especially regarding delay and control plane overhead.