Mitigating Forwarding misbehaviors in RPL-based low power and lossy networks

Abstract

Low power and lossy networks (LLNs) are rapidly emerging as an important part of ubiquitous computing, and serving as a major building block for the communication infrastructure in the presence of Internet-of-Things (IoT). Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is a novel routing protocol standardized to enable the integration of resources-constrained devices into the Internet. However, due to the shared radio medium, the lack of physical protection and security requirements of inherent routing protocol, low power and lossy networks are admittedly threatened by diverse Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks that primarily disrupt network protocols and interfere with on-going communications. In this paper, we propose a monitor-based approach, called CMD, to mitigate forwarding misbehaviors in LLNs running with RPL, where single or multiple malicious nodes randomly or strategically drop any incoming Data packet. The basic idea of the CMD is that each node monitors the forwarding behaviors of the preferred parent node to observe the packet loss rate, compares the observation result with the collected packet loss rate from one-hop neighbor nodes, and detects the forwarding misbehaviors of the preferred parent node. We evaluate the proposed scheme through extensive simulation experiments using OMNeT++ and compare its performance with the original RPL protocol and the existing two-step detection scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can not only improve the detection rate and packet delivery ratio (PDR) but also can reduce the energy consumption and isolation latency.