Energy Efficient RPL Objective Function Using FIT IoT-Lab

The Internet of Things connects and establishes communication between the heterogeneous devices. The network used in IoT is low power and lossy networks which is commonly known as LLN. The components in LLN use low power for its operations. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined routing protocol for standardized LLN, i.e., routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL). The RPL selects suitable path to reach the destination by constructing the destination oriented directed acyclic graph (DODAG). The DODAG can be constructed based on the type of objective function. RPL commonly uses two objective functions they are, MRHOF and objective function zero. The objective function zero uses hop count as its metric, and MRHOF uses the metric of expected transmission count. Hence, selection of the energy efficient objective function plays an important role to make the network of IoT more energy efficient. In existing research, the superiority of MRHOF and OF0 is experimented using only simulation not using the real testbed. Hence, it is essential to conduct the experiment in real testbed to identify the energy efficient objective function. Future Internet of Things (FIT) lab is a platform to carry out the large-scale experimentation using testbed. In this paper, two objective functions MRHOF and OF0 are considered, and experiments are performed in FIT IoT-Lab to identify the energy efficient objective function. After the experiment, it is identified that objective function zero is more energy efficient than MRHOF. From the results of simulation and real testbed experiments, it is concluded that OF0 consumes less energy than the MRHOF.