Performance analysis of RPL protocol for data gathering applications in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks is made up of many tiny nodes that has the ability to measure physical phenomena and send the collected measurements to the sink node using multiple-hop protocol with short range transmission. One of the main factors that can be considered to increase the sensor network life is routing protocol. The main goal of routing protocol is to select the most optimal path and make decision of sending the gathering data to the sink node. Inefficient routing protocol leads to more re-transmission of data which consume more energy.Thus, a careful and comprehensive performance analysis of the routing protocols used in any wireless sensor network is required. The main goal of this paper is to study the performance of the RPL protocol under three different MAC protocols named; ContikiMac, CXMAC, NullRDC in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and power consumption to find the best behaviour of the RPL routing protocol under the MAC protocols effect. The results show that NullRDC is better in terms of latency while the ContikiMac outperforms the others in terms of power consumption.