IPv6-based Networks Research Articles

“A lightweight authentication scheme for 6LoWPAN-based Internet-of -things”

ABSTRACT IPv6-based IoT networks, i.e. 6LoWPAN network, require authentication for security. The existing authentication schemes on symmetric-key based approaches for 6LoWPAN consume huge computational and processing overhead in the literature. In a large network, pre-deployment of the key leads to huge memory consumption due to storing many keys. Furthermore, in asymmetric key cryptography, operations with the public key are computationally expensive, which is unsuitable for resource-constrained devices. We proposed a lightweight key exchange and authentication scheme for 6LoWPAN to mutually authenticate the sensor nodes, the gateway, and the server with less computational overhead and without compromising any security credentials. The authentication scheme helps to generate a session key without storing any secrets in the 6LoWPAN devices. We utilized a one-way hash function and XOR operation to reduce overhead in multi-hop communication. The AVISPA verification tool and the formal verification show that the proposed method is resistant to well-known attacks. The proposed scheme outperforms relevant methods in computational overhead, communication cost, and computation time.

Comparative Analysis of the Capabilities of IPv6 and IPv4 Protocols to Provide the Designated Quality of Service

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the IPv4 and IPv6 data transfer protocols to ensure a given quality of service ( QoS ). As parameters of QoS , the bandwidth and the associated transmission rate , as well as the amount of delay and jitter – delay variations are analyzed . The main disadvantages and advantages of both protocols are presented in the form of a table . A model of real interaction between networks operating on the basis of IPv4 and IPv6 protocols has been developed and implemented . The throughput , delay and jitter were measured for an IPv4-based network and an IPv6-based network for various packet sizes (MTU) for UDP and TCP traffic . Conclusions are drawn concerning the possibility and prospects for using the IPv6 protocol to provide a given quality of service .

A Study on Impact of DIS flooding Attack on RPL-based 6LowPAN Network

RPL is the default routing protocol for IPv6-based Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). In an RPL-based 6LoWPAN, wireless sensor nodes or IoT devices connect to the network via DODAG Information Solicitation (DIS) packets with a predetermined time interval. A compromised or malicious node can use the abovementioned technique to broadcast unauthorised DIS messages to neighboring nodes to conduct routing attacks, such as DIS flooding attacks. In this paper, we conduct a simulation-based analysis of the impact of the DIS flooding attack on RPL-based 6LoWPAN under four distinct scenarios, each with two test cases. Scenario 1 is the reference topology, devoid of attacker nodes or test cases. From scenario 2 to scenario 4, the number of DIS attacker nodes increases from one to three to five. In each scenario, in test case A, all attacker nodes are deployed outside the sink node's radio range; in test case B, all attacker nodes are deployed within the sink node's radio range. Our study shows that increasing the number of attacker nodes and deployment location significantly negatively impacts PDR, E2ED, and power consumption. In the case of five DIS attackers nodes deployed within the sink node's radio range, the experimental result decreased PDR by 4.5%, E2ED increased by 62.98%, and the average power consumption increased by 126.7%.

Neuro-Fuzzy-Based Routing Mechanism for Effective Communication in 6LoWPAN-Based IoT Infrastructure

IoT (Internet of Things) devices that are IEEE 802.15.4 compliant are used to build 6LoWPANs (IPv6-based Low Power Personal Area Networks). For most IoT applications' network systems, 6LoWPA is the wireless technology of choice. However, the various IoT systems produce diverse routing patterns in actual network implementation. An objective of such a strategy is to enhance connectivity while ensuring route stability throughout the network at all times.Neuro-Fuzzy Based Routing Mechanism for efficient routing in 6LoWPAN-based IoT infrastructure is proposed. Using neural networks, fuzzy systems can incorporate the computational properties of training the input data into their representations and gain the coherence and interpretation they need. This research finding shows that the suggested routing strategy provides improved communication effectiveness in regards to packet transmission (93%) and other parameters such as energy usage (2.33%) and latency (7.42%).

A secure routing protocol for low power and lossy networks based 6LoWPAN networks to mitigate DIS flooding attacks

Routing protocols for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) is considered as one of the significant information forwarding routing protocols for IPV6-based low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN). However, RPL suffers in lack of an appropriate load balancing mechanism and malicious node attack whenever it communicates the DODAG information solicitation (DIS) messages to join in the network. Moreover, in the existing system, the uneven load leads to packet losses, delay, consumes more power, and degrades the lifespan of the network. In order to avoid the drawbacks this research work proposes a novel adaptive load balancing and route discovery mechanism to eradicate the DIS flooding attacks and improve the network lifespan with the aid of enhanced secure RPL routing protocol. This proposed secure RPL routing protocol distributes the load between the several modes efficiently and mitigates the DIS flooding attack in the network. The proposed approach is implemented using Cooja platform simulator with static and dynamic network scenarios. To compare the performance of the proposed system, the standard RPL protocol and RPL without any security are used. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms the other routing protocol by eradicating the DIS flooding attacks and load distribution over the network. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme could decrease the average packet loss ratio, end-to-end delay, energy consumption, control overheads, and enhance packet delivery, throughput, and network lifespan.

Security offloading network system for expanded security coverage in IPv6-based resource constrained data service networks

Recent years have seen the development of successful internet of things (IoT) technologies based on IP-enabled data networks. Despite the growing demand for security of resource-constrained data service networks, a majority of nodes in them typically lack memory space and computational ability compared to Internet nodes. This restricts constrained nodes from implementing and operating burdensome security protocols and authentication methods. To overcome this problem, we propose a security offloading network system which expands the security coverage to constrained nodes in IPv6-based heterogeneous networks. The proposed system supports constrained nodes by offloading the handshake and data transmission of a security protocol to offloading agents. Constrained nodes can also utilize the ciphersuites of offloading agents without the burden of deploying them. The offloading server controls the registration, the authentication, and the load-balanced allocation of offloading-agents. The implementation and evaluation show the feasibility of the proposed system by presenting practical network performance analyses in respect of availability, responsiveness, protocol overhead, and validation. This research would be advantageous for constrained nodes to achieve a high level of security, lowering the cost of network devices at the same time.

Towards Effective Multisink Support in IPv6-based IoT Networks

Towards Effective Multisink Support in IPv6-based IoT Networks

A framework for Fog-assisted healthcare monitoring

In order to tackle some challenges in ubiquitous healthcare monitoring such as mobility, scalability, and network latency, a framework for Fog-assisted healthcare monitoring is proposed in this paper. This framework is composite of body-sensing layer, Fog layer (Fog-assisted gateway), Cloud layer (health Cloud). And then, this paper makes an intensive study in some key technologies of the proposed framework such as an IPv6-based network architecture, intelligent warning model based on subband energy feature, security framework of HL7 RIM-based data exchange, health risk assessment based on fusion of grey model and Markov model. Finally, results of experiment depict that the proposed intelligent warning model can make immediate distinction abnormal signals. Moreover, the proposed health assessment model confirms its effectiveness with respect to 245 patients in Xiamen District of Jimei.

An IPv6-based framework for fog-assisted healthcare monitoring

The new generation healthcare monitoring system combines technologies of wireless body sensor network, cloud computing, and Bigdata, and there are still limitations in protocol security, response delay, and prediction of potential severity disease. In response to the above situation, an Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)-based framework for fog-assisted healthcare monitoring is proposed. This framework is composite of body-sensing layer, fog layer, and cloud layer. The body-sensing layer generates physiological data, and fog computing node in fog layer collects and analyses time-sensitive data. Fog layer sends physiological data to cloud computing node in cloud layer for further processing. Mobile intelligent device connects fog computing node and helps individuals to predict the potential disease with its level of severity. The proposed framework uses advanced techniques such as IPv6-based network architecture, cloud–fog resource scheduling algorithm based on time threshold, and classification model of chronic diseases based on cascaded deep learning and so on. In order to determine the validity of the framework, health data were systematically generated from 45 patients for 30 days. Results depict that the proposed classification model of chronic diseases has high accuracy in determining the level of severity of potential disease. Moreover, response delay is much lower than Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4)-based cloud-assisted environment.

Nor Effendy Othman, Rosilah Hassan, Abdul Hadi Abd Rahman, Dahlila Putri Dahnil Sikumbang, Khairul Azmi Abu Bakar

Mobility management nowadays plays a ­critical role in delivering a seamless and quality service to millions of users worldwide and it is transparent from the user's involvement. The current state of implementation and the introduction of transition is not focused on the implementation of mobility scenario communications protocol IPv4 over IPv6 protocol-based networks. The growing trend toward mobile access drives the development of mobility management in a dual-stack network environment. Implementation of IP mobility allows mobile users to roam from one network to another without causing significant network interruption. However, the existing implementation of dual-stack mobility does not provide an efficient platform for handling handover scenarios that leads to sub-optimal mobility experience. This study presents the implementation of the Distributed Mobility Management Proxy Mobile IPv6 (DMM PMIPv6) protocol on a dual-stack platform. This protocol was developed based on the concept of network in which the pointer is placed near the user's mobility or mobile node. The distributed control plane and the data infrastructure between entities are located on the edge of the access network which basically reduce the burden on the signalling process thus improving the handover performance. Therefore this study was initiated on existing protocol architecture for the implementation of mobility in the dual-stack scenario. This study proposes a dual-stack implementation of mobility based on DMM PMIPv6 protocol through IPv4 Home Address Mobility Support scenario that allows the mobile node capable of dual-stack and IPv4-based to communicate in IPv6-based network, in order to provide a better performance in terms of handover compared to the previous research implementations. DMM PMIPv6 Dual-Stack protocol testbed was implemented to investigate the handover performance. The results show that the mechanism provides better handover performance compared to the previous studies using PMIPv6 Dual-Stack implementation, thus able to provide a seamless connection to the user.

A study of IP-based vehicular gateway with IPv6

With the progress of ambient sensor networks (ASNs), there is a trend that each node in ASNs should gather information and the server will supply intelligent service for users by processing and analysing the information. In order to achieve this purpose, each node and server must communicate with each other freely. IPv6 lets any host generate a unique IP address and supply far more addresses than IPv4. Therefore, it is necessary to migrate the IP address of each node from IPv4 to IPv6. As a proof-of-concept, we use the vehicle as an example. We propose the design and implementation of an IPv6-based in-vehicle gateway (IVG) and achieve end-to-end access between IPv6-based controller area network (CAN) unit and Ethernet. We use tunnel technology solve the issue through IPv4 to IPv6, develop address mapping method, and implement this notion by a prototype vehicle.

A Novel Range Matching Architecture for Packet Classification Without Rule Expansion

The speed requirement for the routing table lookup and the packet classification is rapidly increasing due to the increase in the number of packets needed to be processed per second. The hardware-based packet classification relies on ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) to meet this speed requirement. However, TCAM consumes huge power and also supports only for longest prefix match and exact match, where the classification rule also has a range match (RM) field. Hence, it is mandatory to encode the RM into prefix match to accommodate the rule in TCAM. In the worst case, one rule is encoded into (2 W -2) 2 rules (where W is a number of bits to represent range). This work proposes a novel RM architecture, and a detailed analysis about the range field on the standard dataset and the real-life classifier rules are presented. In the literature, the existing RM architecture is used to avoid the range to prefix conversion, but due to the serial operation, it lacks in performance. For constant time lookup, TCAM is the best option, but it does not support RM. The proposed architecture takes one clock cycle for RM and does not require any encoding/ conversion. Hence, there will be a single entry for every rule. It is observed that just 4% of the two-dimensional range rules are present in this dataset, and it will increase the rule set size by 4 times in the best case and nearly 30 times in the worst case. The proposed RM circuit is operated in parallel with TCAM without compromising the speed, and this circuit saves huge power around 70% and area around 61%, where the range to prefix conversion/encoding is completely avoided. The proposed architecture is well suited for current IPv4- and IPv6-based networks, as well as in software-defined networks in the near future.

A survey on handover management in mobility architectures

This work presents a comprehensive and structured taxonomy of available techniques for managing the handover process in mobility architectures. Representative works from the existing literature have been divided into appropriate categories, based on their ability to support horizontal handovers, vertical handovers and multihoming. We describe approaches designed to work on the current Internet (i.e. IPv4-based networks), as well as those that have been devised for the “future” Internet (e.g. IPv6-based networks and extensions). Quantitative measures and qualitative indicators are also presented and used to evaluate and compare the examined approaches. This critical review provides some valuable guidelines and suggestions for designing and developing mobility architectures, including some practical expedients (e.g. those required in the current Internet environment), aimed to cope with the presence of NAT/firewalls and to provide support to legacy systems and several communication protocols working at the application layer.

A cross-layer mobility handover scheme for IPv6-based vehicular networks

This paper proposes a cross-layer mobility handover scheme for IPv6-based vehicular networks. In this scheme, the architecture for vehicular networks is proposed and it is made up of three hierarchies including road domains, road segments and clusters. A vehicular network is made up of multiple road domains, a road domain consists of multiple road segments, and a road segment includes multiple clusters. Based on this architecture, the cluster generation algorithm based on the link duration time is proposed, and the cross-layer mobility handover algorithm is presented. In the handover algorithm, the handover in the network layer (L3) is launched before the one in the link layer (L2). Through the L3 handover process the information on the L2 handover can be acquired in order to achieve the fast L2 handover. Moreover, during the L3 handover process, a vehicle does not need to be configured with a care-of address, so the L3 handover delay and packet loss are reduced. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated, and the data results show that this scheme shortens the handover delay and lowers the packet loss rate.

IPv6-Based Vehicular Cloud Networking

In a vehicular cloud network, content-centric approaches are usually employed to seek contents. In the content-centric approaches, data attributes are used for routing instead of a specific address such as an IP address; i.e, data attributes are broadcasted in a vehicular cloud network to seek target contents. This flooding inevitably increases the cost of contents acquisition. To reduce the cost of contents acquisition, we propose an IPv6-based vehicular cloud network where IP-based unicast instead of content-centric broadcast is used to achieve contents acquisition. In this work, a new address structure is proposed to build the relationship between an IP address and a kind of contents, and via this new address contents can be acquired from the nearest vehicular cloud member in the unicast way. This scheme is analyzed and evaluated, and the data show that this scheme effectively reduces the cost of contents acquisition.

Quality-of-service aware routing for static and mobile IPv6-based low-power and lossy sensor networks using RPL

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a paradigm over the last few years as a result of the tight integration of the computing and the physical world. The requirement of remote sensing makes low-power wireless sensor networks one of the key enabling technologies of IoT. These networks encompass several challenges, especially in communication and networking, due to their inherent constraints of low-power features, deployment in harsh and lossy environments, and limited computing and storage resources. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) [1] was proposed by the IETF ROLL (Routing Over Low-power Lossy links) working group and is currently adopted as an IETF standard in the RFC 6550 since March 2012. Although RPL greatly satisfied the requirements of low-power and lossy sensor networks, several issues remain open for improvement and specification, in particular with respect to Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and support for mobility.In this paper, we focus mainly on the RPL routing protocol. We propose some enhancements to the standard specification in order to provide QoS guarantees for static as well as mobile LLNs. For this purpose, we propose OF-FL (Objective Function based on Fuzzy Logic), a new objective function that overcomes the limitations of the standardized objective functions that were designed for RPL by considering important link and node metrics, namely end-to-end delay, number of hops, ETX (Expected transmission count) and LQL (Link Quality Level). In addition, we present the design of Co-RPL, an extension to RPL based on the corona mechanism that supports mobility in order to overcome the problem of slow reactivity to frequent topology changes and thus providing a better quality of service mainly in dynamic networks application. Performance evaluation results show that both OF-FL and Co-RPL allow a great improvement when compared to the standard specification, mainly in terms of packet loss ratio and average network latency.

Seamless Mobility Management Schemes for IPv6-based Wireless Networks

Mobility management is one major challenge for wireless network design. Advanced wireless technologies provide mobile nodes with multi-mode radio interfaces, so subscribers can benefit from disparate mobile communication systems. Meanwhile, researchers are putting efforts into standardization of IPv6-based mobility protocols. Hence, wireless networks can offer more flexible mobility support than ever before. However, as the demands for high-speed Internet access and multimedia services increase, guaranteeing host mobility with quality of service provisioning becomes more difficult. Both network connectivity and session continuity need to be carefully handled during handover. This paper proposes a new mobility protocol, called seamless mobile IPv6 (SMIPv6). Its novelty consists of pre-configuring bidirectional secure tunnels among access routers before handoff, as well as using such tunnels to guarantee handoff seamlessness. To evaluate the performance, simulations are conducted using OPNET Modeler v.12.0, of which results demonstrate that SMIPv6 delivers better performance than MIPv6 in terms of handoff latency and packet losses.

An Enhanced Inter-domain Mobile Protocol for IPv6-based Wireless Networks

ABSTRACTThis paper proposes an enhanced inter-domain mobile protocol for IPv6-based wireless networks. In this protocol, the domain-based architecture is proposed and the IPv6 address structure is presented. In this architecture, a wireless network is made up of multiple global domains, and a global domain consists of multiple local domains. Based on this architecture, the inter-domain handover algorithm is proposed. In this algorithm, a mobile node is always identified by its home address during its life time, the handover in the link layer and the one in the network layer are performed in parallel, and a mobile node always receives data from the same border mobile access gateway. Moreover, a mobile node uses the channel information to directly perform the handover in the link layer. Therefore, the handover delay is shortened and the packet loss is lowered. This paper evaluates the performance parameters of this scheme, and the data results show that this scheme lowers the handover delay and packet loss.

A Secure IPv6 Address Configuration Protocol for Vehicular Networks

This paper proposes a secure address configuration protocol for IPv6-based vehicular networks. In this protocol, the network architecture is proposed. In this architecture, a vehicle obtains a unique address from a neighbor vehicle or an access point without DAD, and a leaving vehicle's address space can be automatically reclaimed for reassignment. Based on this architecture, the address configuration algorithm is presented. In this algorithm, an access point or a vehicle owns the unique address space and assigns a unique address to a neighbor vehicle without DAD, so the address configuration cost and delay are lowered. The identification of a vehicle can be authenticated, so the security is achieved. This paper evaluates the performance of this protocol. The data results show that this protocol effectively improves the address configuration performance.

Communication techniques and challenges for wireless food quality monitoring.

Remote measurement of product core temperature is an important prerequisite to improve the cool chain of food products and reduce losses. This paper examines and shows possible solutions to technical challenges that still hinder practical applications of wireless sensor networks in the field of food transport supervision. The high signal attenuation by water-containing products limits the communication range to less than 0.5 m for the commonly used 2.4 GHz radio chips. By theoretical analysis of the dependency of signal attenuation on the operating frequency, we show that the signal attenuation can be largely reduced by the use of 433 MHz or 866 MHz devices, but forwarding of messages over multiple hops inside a sensor network is mostly unavoidable to guarantee full coverage of a packed container. Communication protocols have to provide compatibility with widely accepted standards for integration into the global Internet, which has been achieved by programming an implementation of the constrained application protocol for wireless sensor nodes and integrating into IPv6-based networks. The sensor's battery lifetime can be extended by optimizing communication protocols and by in-network pre-processing of the sensor data. The feasibility of remote freight supervision was demonstrated by our full-scale 'Intelligent Container' prototype.