Simulation and Comparison of RPL, 6LoWPAN, and CoAP Protocols Using Cooja Simulator

Abstract

The amount of connected entities has already gone beyond the total amount of human being few years ago, and it is predicted to reach 50 billion by the end of 2025. As more and more devices are being introduced in our regular life, it has created immense pressure on communication in terms of routing. Therefore, the necessities of application-specific communication protocols have risen up and will continue in future days to come. This paper is mainly focused on a comparative analysis of the three protocols 6LoWPAN, RPL, and CoAP and finding out the best protocols among them for the communication between IoT nodes. The performance of these protocols has been compared depending on different criteria like total packets, received packets, number of nodes, simulation time, and number of IoT nodes on cooja platform. According to the result, packet transfer rate of CoAP is fair but slow. On the contrary, RPL packet loss rate was high but demonstrated fast communication; however, most importantly, 6LoWPAN performed better than RPL and CoAP in our simulations.