Performance of RPL in Healthcare Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract: The new advances of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology can be utilized to promote service delivery in several real-life applications such as healthcare systems. The Routing Protocol for Low Power and Loss Network (RPL) is a routing protocol designed to serve as a proper routing protocol for packets in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Among the most prominent issues exist in the RPL protocol are packet loss within the WSN and sensors power consumption especially in healthcare WSNs. Multiple Objective Functions (OF) in RPL intended to find the routes from source nodes to a destination node. This paper presents an evaluation to discover which OF is more efficient for a WSN in a healthcare scenario where the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) of WSN and the sensors' power consumption are prominent concerns. Expected transmission Count (ETX) and Objective Function Zero (OF0) of RPL were examined in various network densities and network topologies such as the grid and random topology. The simulation outcomes revealed that the OF0 is more efficient regarding the PDR and power consumption compared to the ETX in random