Introducing Mobility Metrics in Trust-based Security of Routing Protocol for Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is flourishing in several application areas, such as smart cities, smart factories, smart homes, smart healthcare, etc. With the adoption of IoT in critical scenarios, it is crucial to investigate its security aspects. All the layers of IoT are vulnerable to severely disruptive attacks. However, the attacks in IoT Network layer have a high impact on communication between the connected objects. Routing in most of the IoT networks is carried out by IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). RPL-based IoT offers limited protection against routing attacks. A trust-based approach for routing security is suitable to be integrated with IoT systems due to the resource-constrained nature of devices. This research proposes a trust-based secure routing protocol to provide security against packet dropping attacks in RPL-based IoT networks. IoT networks are dynamic and consist of both static and mobile nodes. Hence the chosen trust metrics in the proposed method also include the mobility-based metrics for trust evaluation. The proposed solution is integrated into RPL as a modified objective function, and the results are compared with the default RPL objective function, MRHOF. The analysis and evaluation of the proposed protocol indicate its efficacy and adaptability in a mobile IoT environment.