A Performance Evaluation of RPL in Mobile IoT Applications: A Practical Approach

Abstract The routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) has become the standard routing protocol for the Internet of things (IoT). Since its standardization in RFC6550 in 2012, the volume of RPL-related research has increased exponentially and many enhancements and studies were introduced to evaluate and improve this protocol. However, most of these studies focus on simulation and have little interest in practical evaluation. Currently, seven years after the standardization of RPL, it is time to put it to a practical test in real IoT applications and evaluate the feasibility of deploying and using RPL at its current state. In this paper, we present a hands-on practical testing of RPL in different scenarios and under different conditions to evaluate its efficiency in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), throughput, latency and energy consumption.