Performance Analysis of Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Links (RPL) in Military Hierarchical Networks

Routing protocol delivers real-time sensorial information to a dedicated controlling station for information processing and decision making in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It enables synchronization of the digital and real world, and plays a crucial role to automate operations. In WSNs, the RPL protocol has been studied much but it has been explored very less for military applications. This paper presents the military applications followed by evaluation and analysis of the RPL based on certain performance metric such as control packet overhead, power consumption, and packet delivery ratio at various packet error rates. To analyze the performance, hierarchal network topology scenarios for military application is simulated using Contiki OS based Cooja simulation environment. The simulation results show that RPL performs well in small size hierarchical networks but suffer from high control packet overhead, and decreased performance in large size hierarchical networks.