Control Messages Overhead Impact on Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph—A Wireless Sensor Networks Objective Functions Performance Comparison

Abstract

Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Network (RPL) with IPv6 support is the de facto standard for routing over Low-power and Lossy Network (LLN) called Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Objective Functions namely Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function (MRHOF) and Objective Function Zero (OF0) together with the Internet Control Messaging Protocol (ICMP) control messages, propel RPL to constructs routing paths called Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG), for packet routing within the sensor network. To the best knowledge of the authors, no detailed investigation has been carried out to unravel the dynamics of how these control messages impact on the network with respect to DODAG formation right before convergence is attained, particularly from the perspective of MRHOF and OF0. In this paper, the authors investigated the various types of control messages (DODAG Information Solicitation, DODAG Information Object and Destination Advertisement Object) used to setup the DODAG. RPL Simulations was carried out on one 100 nodes, starting with 10 nodes and incremented by 10 until the 100th node. Each simulation was repeated five times with a confidence level of 95%, which statistically signifies a reliable and acceptable confidence interval, for a duration of thirty minutes. Results obtained showed that the DIS–OF0 generated the least packets with 125 packets, followed by DAO–MRHOF with 1357 packets and the most generated; DIO–MRHOF with 1536 packets. Subsequently, MRHOF had higher Convergence Time of 130.67 seconds as to 87.93 seconds for OF0. This information is valuable for both the academia and industry.