Analysis of Maximum Depth of Wireless Sensor Network Based on RPL and IEEE 802.15.4

The nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSN) are typically resource constrained so that they can maintain only a few routes. More-capable nodes can insert extra routing information, i.e. source routing header (SRH), into packets to instruct the resource constrained ones to route the packet. A WSN with deeper depth requires longer SRH, thus leaving less space of a packet for the user data. We analyze the relationship between the length of the user data and the maximum depth of a WSN based on RPL and IEEE 802.15.4. The results can guide the application designers and the network administrators in selecting a suitable length of user data to guarantee that the data can be routed to each sensor nodes. Simulation results prove the correctness of our analysis.