Evaluating the Performance of RPL and 6LoWPAN in TinyOS

Responding to the increasing interest to connect wireless sensor networks (WSN) to the Internet, the IETF has proposed standards that enable IPv6-based sensor networks. Specifically, the IETF 6LoWPAN and RoLL working groups developed standards for encapsulating IPv6 datagrams in 802.15.4 frames, neighbor discovery, and routing that allow sensor networks to exchange IPv6 datagrams with Internet hosts. However, given that these standards, especially the RPL routing protocol, are relatively new, there has not yet been a study that measures the actual performance of these proposals using real implementations. In this work, we use the BLIP and TinyRPL implementations in TinyOS 2.x to evaluate the performance of the newly proposed standards and compare them with CTP, the de-facto routing protocol standard for TinyOS. Our results indicate that the performance of TinyRPL is comparable with CTP and at the same time, TinyRPL can provide additional functionalities that traditional WSN routing protocols could not provide. We also discovered several issues, relevant to system developers and the standardization groups, which can enhance the proposed standards’ performance.