A number of protocol parameters influence the efficiency of RPL; the four significant among them are DIO( (DODAG Information Object) minimum interval, DIO Doublings, Radio Duty Cycling interval and Frequency of application messages.
To do this in Contiki (OS) you should measure five standard performance metrics namely Network convergence, Control Traffic overhead, Energy consumption, Packet Latency and PDR to evaluate the performance of RPL.
The first performance metric of interest is Network Convergence Time. The nodes in a sensor network need to form a topology in order to communicate. Therefore the network setup time is a crucial metric that need to be evaluated for any routing protocol. The Convergence Time of the RPL DAG is defined as the amount of time needed by all the reachable (in terms of radio) nodes in the network to join the DAG.
The second performance metric is Control Traffic Overhead for the network. This includes DIO, DIS and DAO messages generated by each node and it is imperative to confine the Control Traffic keeping in mind the scarce resources in LLN. RPL control the redundant control messages by making use of trickle timers. The aim of this metric is to analyze the effect of the stated parameters on the Control Traffic overhead.
The third performance metric is Energy Consumption. To make good energy estimation you should use percent radio on time of the radio which dominates the power usage in sensor nodes. Furthermore you should take the average percent radio on time for all the nodes in the whole network setup.
The fourth performance metric is Packet Latency. The Latency is defined as the amount of time taken by a packet from node to reach the sink and is the average of the latencies of all the packets in the network from all the nodes.
The fifth metric is Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and is defined as the number of received packets at the sink to the number of sent packets to sink. you should take the average PDR of all the packets received successfully at sink.