Low-power Networks Research Articles

RPLAD3: anomaly detection of blackhole, grayhole, and selective forwarding attacks in wireless sensor network-based Internet of Things.

Routing protocols transmit vast amounts of sensor data between the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and the Internet of Things (IoT) gateway. One of these routing protocols is Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defined RPL in March 2012 as a de facto distance-vector routing protocol for wireless communications with lower energy. Although RPL messages use a cryptographic algorithm for security protection, it does not help prevent internal attacks. These attacks drop some or all packets, such as blackhole or selective forwarding attacks, or change data packets, like grayhole attacks. The RPL protocol needs to be strengthened to address such an issue, as only a limited number of studies have been conducted on detecting internal attacks. Moreover, earlier research should have considered the mobility framework, a vital feature of the IoT. This article presents a novel lightweight system for anomaly detection of grayhole, blackhole, and selective forwarding attacks. The study aims to use a trust model in the RPL protocol, considering attack detection under mobility frameworks. The proposed system, anomaly detection of three RPL attacks (RPLAD3), is designed in four layers and starts operating immediately after the initial state of the network. The experiments demonstrated that RPLAD3 outperforms the RPL protocol when defeating attacks with high accuracy and a true positive ratio while lowering power and energy consumption. In addition, it significantly improves the packet delivery ratio and decreases the false positive ratio to zero.

TDD LoRa and Delta Encoding in Low-Power Networks of Environmental Sensor Arrays for Temperature and Deformation Monitoring

Densely distributed sensor networks can revolutionize environmental observations by providing real-time data with an unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution. However, field deployments often pose unique challenges in terms of power provisions and wireless connectivity. We present a framework for wirelessly connected distributed sensor arrays for near-surface temperature and/or deformation monitoring. Our research focuses on a novel time division duplex implementation of the LoRa protocol, enabling battery powered base stations and avoiding collisions within the network. In order to minimize transmissions and improve battery life throughout the network, we propose a dedicated delta encoding algorithm that utilizes the spatial and temporal similarity in the acquired data sets. We implemented the developed technologies in a AA battery powered hardware platform that can be used as a wireless data logger or base station, and we conducted an assessment of the power consumption. Without data compression, the projected battery life for a data logger is 4.74 years, and a wireless base stations can last several weeks or months depending on the amount of network traffic. The delta encoding algorithm can further improve this battery life with a factor of up to 3.50. Our results demonstrate the viability of the proposed methods for low-power environmental wireless sensor networks.

LDES: detector design for version number attack detection using linear temporal logic based on discrete event system

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined routing protocols for low power and lossy networks (RPL) for constrained devices. RPL constructs DODAGs (destination oriented directed acyclic graphs), to optimize routing. RPL ensures acyclic topology with the DODAG version number. However, the control message’s DODAG version number is not authenticated. So, RPL is vulnerable to network resource attack known as DODAG Version Number (DVN) attack. DVN attack creates a packet delay, packet loss, cyclic topology, etc., in the network. This paper proposes a method for detecting DODAG version number attacks. Several existing schemes to defend against the DVN, such as cryptographic techniques, trust-based, threshold-based and mitigation are computationally intensive or require protocol modification. DVN does not change the packet format or sequence of packets, but can still perform attacks and hence fall under the category of stealthy attacks, which are difficult to detect using traditional intrusion detection system’s (IDS). Discrete-event system (DES) based IDS have been applied in the literature for stealthy attacks that achieve low overhead, low false alarm rate, etc. However, the construction of DES-based IDS for network protocol may lead to errors, as modelling is manual. The resulting IDS, therefore, is unable to guarantee its correctness. This paper proposes linear temporal logic (LTL) based DES paradigm to detect DVN. LTL-based paradigm facilitates formal verification of the DES-based IDS, and hence the correctness of the scheme is ascertained. The proposed technique is simulated using the Contiki cooja simulator. When the percentage of spiteful nodes in the network increases, the true positive rate, and packet delivery rate drops, while the false positive rate and control message overhead increase. The memory requirement for sending the packets and verifying the nodes is minimal. The LTL-based IDS has been formally verified using NuSMV to ensure the correctness of the framework.

Enabling Semantic-Functional Communications for Multiuser Event Transmissions via Wireless Power Transfer.

A central concern for large-scale sensor networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) has been battery capacity and how to recharge it. Recent advances have pointed to a technique capable of collecting energy from radio frequency (RF) waves called radio frequency-based energy harvesting (RF-EH) as a solution for low-power networks where cables or even changing the battery is unfeasible. The technical literature addresses energy harvesting techniques as an isolated block by dealing with energy harvesting apart from the other aspects inherent to the transmitter and receiver. Thus, the energy spent on data transmission cannot be used together to charge the battery and decode information. As an extension to them, we propose here a method that enables the information to be recovered from the battery charge by designing a sensor network operating with a semanticfunctional communication framework. Moreover, we propose an event-driven sensor network in which batteries are recharged by applying the technique RF-EH. In order to evaluate system performance, we investigated event signaling, event detection, empty battery, and signaling success rates, as well as the Age of Information (AoI). We discuss how the main parameters are related to the system behavior based on a representative case study, also discussing the battery charge behavior. Numerical results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

A new lightweight decentralized mitigation solution against Version Number Attacks for IoT Networks 

The present work describes a new technique to mitigate the version number attack (VNA), which is classified as one among the known denial of service (DDoS) damaging attacks targeting RPL-based (Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks) IoTs networks. Through a VNA, the malicious behavior induces an increase in the control overhead and affects nodes’ ressources in terms of processing and memory, thereby the network availability is directly targeted. The lightweight proposed algorithm is run by each node where the main purpose is to halt the spread of a faked version number over the network and to recover victim nodes. The proposed solution has been implemented and simulated using Cooja under Contiki OS. Simulation results obviously show that our proposed technique promises significant improvements in various measured metrics while optimizing the node resources in terms of processing and memory usage. Compared to the network under attack, the control overhead has been shortened by 83% and the energy consumption has been reduced by 74%. In addition, the packet delivery ratio (PDR) has been improved to reach (99,6%), and the latency has been restored to attain the same value as in the normal case.   

An Analysis into Physical and Virtual Power Draw Characteristics of Embedded Wireless Sensor Network Devices under DoS and RPL-Based Attacks.

Currently, within the world, cybercrime is becoming increasingly rampant-often targeting civil infrastructure like power stations and other critical systems. A trend that is being noticed with these attacks is their increased use of embedded devices in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. This creates a substantial risk to systems and infrastructures worldwide. Threats to embedded devices can be significant, and network stability and reliability can suffer, mainly through the risk of battery draining or complete system hang. This paper investigates such consequences through simulations of excessive loads, by staging attacks on embedded devices. Experimentation within Contiki OS focused on loads placed on physical and virtualised wireless sensor network (WSN) embedded devices by launching DoS attacks and by exploiting the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). Results from these experiments were based on the metric of power draw, mainly the percentage increase over baseline and the pattern of it. The physical study relied on the output of the inline power analyser and the virtual study relied on the output of a Cooja plugin called PowerTracker. This involved experiments on both physical and virtual devices, and analysis of the power draws characteristics of WSN devices with a focus on embedded Linux platforms and Contiki OS. Experimental results provide evidence that peak power draining occurs with a malicious-node-to-sensor device ratio of 13-to-1. Results show a decline in power usage with a more expansive 16-sensor network after modelling and simulating a growing sensor network within the Cooja simulator.

QSec-RPL: Detection of version number attacks in RPL based mobile IoT using Q-Learning

Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the networking by connecting the real world entities to the Internet. IoT connects the communication devices and has an incredible impact on perspective analytics on the massive volume of data produced every day. An attacker may exploit vulnerabilities of IoT entities and compromise users’ security and privacy. Development of solutions to address security and privacy issues of IoT is in premature stage and considered as challenge. This challenge becomes more critical when the devices in the network are resource-constrained in terms of energy, processing and memory. The IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) has emerged in recent years as an adaptation layer to carry IPv6 packets over IEEE 802.15.4. Many IoT applications use Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) as a network layer protocol developed for routing in 6LoWPAN. Security is challenging in resource constrained environment where encryption may not be a viable solution. Version number attack is one of the most common network layer attacks against RPL based 6LoWPAN. The RPL specification does not address the integrity of the version number and therefore leaves version number mechanism as a weak point in terms of security. This paper investigates the impact of version number attack in RPL networks while considering mobility of the sensor nodes. We propose a solution that utilizes Q-Learning strategy to detect the malicious nodes that are performing version number attack. The proposed approach detects malicious nodes with reasonable accuracy while imposing significantly less overhead on the nodes of low power and lossy networks. There are other approaches too like Message Authentication Codes (MAC) based on symmetric keys but these techniques have memory and communication overhead. So we propose different approach Q-Learning to detect the attacker nodes.

Investigations on Information Solicitation and Version Number Attacks in Internet of Things

Self-organizing maps (SOMs) have been widely known for resolving a variety of detection and classification problems. It is a special kind of machine learning technique that sorts out the issue without any supervision. On the other hand, there is a key protocol named routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL), i.e., used in the low power networks. There are several security attacks on RPL including the destination-oriented directed acyclic graph (DODAG) information solicitation (DIS) and the version number attacks. It would be vital to use SOM for sensing such attacks. In this article, SOM based scheme has been deployed to sense the DIS and the version number attacks in RPL based Internet of Things (IoT) networks. These attacks have been applied to three scenarios. Two scenarios implemented one attack each from the aforesaid attacks. The third scenario has been analyzed with both the attacks jointly. The proposed approach uniquely sensed the security attacks in all the scenarios.

Optimizing Resources and Increasing the Coverage of Internet-of-Things (IoT) Networks: An Approach Based on LoRaWAN.

A resource optimization methodology is proposed for application in long range wide area networks (LoRaWANs). Using variable neighborhood search (VNS) and a minimum-cost spanning tree algorithm, it reduces the implementation and the maintenance costs of such low power networks. Performance evaluations were conducted in LoRaWANs with LoRa repeaters to increase coverage, in scenario where the number and the location of the repeaters are determined by the VNS metaheuristic. Parameters such as spread factor (SF), bandwidth and transmission power were adjusted to minimize the network's total energy per useful bit (Ebit) and the total data collection time. The importance of the SF in the trade-off between (Ebit) and time on-air is evaluated, considering a device scaling factor. Simulation results, obtained after model adjustments with experimental data, show that, in networks with few associated devices, there is a preference for small values of SF aiming at reduction of Ebit. The usage of large SF's becomes relevant when reach extensions are required. The results also demonstrate that, for networks with high number of nodes, the scaling of devices over time become relevant in the fitness function, forcing an equal distribution of time slots per SF to avoid discrepancies in the time data collection.

Efficient Secure Routing Mechanisms for the Low-Powered IoT Network: A Literature Review

The Wireless Sensor Network in the Internet of Things (WSN-IoT) has been flourishing as another global breakthrough over the past few years. The WSN-IoT is reforming the way we live today by spreading through all areas of life, including the dangerous demographic aging crisis and the subsequent decline of jobs. For a company to increase revenues and cost-effectiveness growth should be customer-centered and agile within an organization. WSN-IoT networks have simultaneously faced threats, such as sniffing, spoofing, and intruders. However, WSN-IoT networks are often made up of multiple embedded devices (sensors and actuators) with limited resources that are joined via various connections in a low-power and lossy manner. However, to our knowledge, no research has yet been conducted into the security methods. Recently, a Contiki operating system’s partial implementation of Routing Protocol for Low Power & Lossy Network RPL’s security mechanisms was published, allowing us to evaluate RPL’s security methods. This paper presents a critical analysis of security issues in the WSN-IoT and applications of WSN-IoT, along with network management details using machine learning. The paper gives insights into the Internet of Things in Low Power Networks (IoT-LPN) architecture, research challenges of the Internet of Things in Low Power Networks, network attacks in WSN-IoT infrastructures, and the significant WSN-IoT objectives that need to be accompanied by current WSN-IoT frameworks. Several applied WSN-IoT security mechanisms and recent contributions have been considered, and their boundaries have been stated to be a significant research area in the future. Moreover, various low-powered IoT protocols have been further discussed and evaluated, along with their limitations. Finally, a comparative analysis is performed to assess the proposed work’s performance. The study shows that the proposed work covers a wide range of factors, whereas the rest of the research in the literature is limited.

Compatible Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Network in Iot Environment.

Compatible Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Network in Iot Environment.

A Review on the Security of IoT Networks: From Network Layer’s Perspective

Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the world in the last decade. Today millions of devices are connected to each other utilizing IoT technology in one way or the other. With the significant growth in IoT devices, the provision of IoT security is imperative. Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is a network layer protocol, specially designed for routing in IoT devices. RPL protocol faces many attacks such as selective forwarding attacks, blackhole attacks, sybil attacks, wormhole attacks, and sinkhole attacks. All these attacks pose great threats to IoT networks and can substantially affect the performance of the network. In this work, a comprehensive review of internal attacks on the network layer is presented. Specifically, we focus on the literature that considers presenting solutions for the detection and prevention of sinkhole attacks. We reviewed the state-of-the-art works and different performance parameters like energy consumption, scalability, threshold value, packet delivery ratio, and throughput. Moreover, we also present a detailed analysis of machine learning-based algorithms and techniques proposed for the security of RPL protocol against internal attacks.

Improving the performance and reliability of RPL networks through security analysis and QoS support

This review presents the integration of security analysis with Quality of Service (QoS) support in the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks (RPL). This study highlights the importance of the security and QoS. A methodology for security analysis and evaluation of QoS support was proposed. An algorithm for integrating security analysis and QoS support in RPL is presented, addressing the vulnerability assessment and dynamic adaptation of route selection. This review highlights the significance of research on enhancing security and QoS support in RPL and its potential to contribute to the field of low-power and lossy networks.

Security Challenges of Selective Forwarding Attack and Design a Secure ECDH-Based Authentication Protocol to Improve RPL Security

Today, we could describe the Internet of Things (loT) as the pervasive and global network that provides a system for monitoring, controlling, processing, and analyzing the data generated by IoT devices. The huge amount of data generated by IoT devices when transported and routed through the internet presents several challenges. One of the common routing protocols in IoT networks is RPL (Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks), but it is prone to security issues and attacks. Due to the presence of sensitive data in IoT and its exchange in the open network, issues of privacy and security in this network should be given special attention. In addition, the nodes in the Internet of Things have limited resources, and the symmetric encryption key is used to encrypt the data of all nodes, which has security weaknesses. Therefore, an efficient and secure authentication scheme is needed so that IoT nodes can authenticate each other and share a secure session key. In this article, we review security aspects of RPL protocols focusing on selective forwarding attacks. Further, we propose a key agreement and authentication mechanism based on ECDH (Elliptic-Curve Diffie–Hellman). We show that our design is very secure, that it meets security requirements, and that it can withstand known attacks while having low costs for computation and communication.

Quality of Service Improvement in Neighborhood Area Networking for AMI With ZigBee-Based Tunable Clustered Scale-Free Topology and RPL Routing

This paper deals with the unique development of tunable clustered scale-free neighbourhood area networking (TSFNAN) using ZigBee for establishment of smart grid communication. The complexity of ZigBee based multihop mesh links between gateway and smart meters (SMs) are reduced by extracting the hop reduction feature of scale free and tunable clustering schemes. Further, the routing protocol for low power and lossy networking (RPL) is also adopted to avoid the requirement of route discovery during data transmission. The different service challenges of neighbourhood area networking (NAN) in advanced metering infrastructure of smart grid can thus be met with improved quality of service. A Markov chain delay model is developed to analyse the latency and packet loss in data transmission. The gateway position and the number of SMs are made scalable by correlating the hop count with the tunable clustering coefficient. The proposed system is simulated for a given area with (i) four clusters each containing 2500 SMs and (ii) one cluster containing 10000 SMs. A prototype model with 20 ZigBee nodes is experimented with different coverage range. The system performance is discussed and compared for all such case studies and an encouraging result suggests its practical feasibility with improved QoS.

Hybrid Grey Wolf and Dipper Throated Optimization in Network Intrusion Detection Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a modern approach that enables connection with a wide variety of devices remotely. Due to the resource constraints and open nature of IoT nodes, the routing protocol for low power and lossy (RPL) networks may be vulnerable to several routing attacks. That’s why a network intrusion detection system (NIDS) is needed to guard against routing assaults on RPL-based IoT networks. The imbalance between the false and valid attacks in the training set degrades the performance of machine learning employed to detect network attacks. Therefore, we propose in this paper a novel approach to balance the dataset classes based on metaheuristic optimization applied to locality-sensitive hashing and synthetic minority oversampling technique (LSH-SMOTE). The proposed optimization approach is based on a new hybrid between the grey wolf and dipper throated optimization algorithms. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a set of experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of NIDS for three cases, namely, detection without dataset balancing, detection with SMOTE balancing, and detection with the proposed optimized LSH-SOMTE balancing. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach outperforms the other approaches and could boost the detection accuracy. In addition, a statistical analysis is performed to study the significance and stability of the proposed approach. The conducted experiments include seven different types of attack cases in the RPL-NIDS17 dataset. Based on the proposed approach, the achieved accuracy is (98.1%), sensitivity is (97.8%), and specificity is (98.8%).

RTP transport in IoT MQTT topologies

Media transmission in the context of constrained IoT devices is of critical importance to support several solutions that enable interaction with the physical environment. This includes solutions that range from scenarios of occupancy estimation in building automation to traditional audio and image processing in remote sensing. Many modern access side IoT networks follow Event Driven Architecture (EDA) topologies that rely on brokers to forward messages between endpoints. The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is one such protocol that can be used to encapsulate well known Real Time Protocol (RTP) audio and media packets. Unfortunately, MQTT relies on TCP transport that is not well suited in IoT constrained environments. This paper introduces a scheme that leverages some of the MQTT features to enable the reliable transmission of media in the context of Lossy Low Power Networks (LLNs). Specifically, this scheme is presented, analyzed, optimized and compared against other state-of-the-art mechanisms.

Energy-efficient Data Aggregation in Low-power Wireless Networks with Sensors of Discrete Transmission Ranges: A Mathematical Framework for Network Design

The advancements in sensor technology and the evolution of new generation technologies such as the Internet of Things have led to extensive deployment of low-power wireless sensor networks for various surveillance and monitoring applications. The volume and velocity of the data generated by a large number of sensors and monitors used in such applications are huge. The harnessing of such big data is critical to the real-time control of underlying real-world processes. Future generation networks favor the deployment of sensors with different discrete transmission ranges. Such multiple transmission ranges introduce different connectivity constraints in the network. Advanced strategies are under investigation for designing energy-efficient data aggregation schemes in such connectivity-constrained networks. To aid such works, we introduce a mathematical framework that captures the salient features of low-power networks with sensors of multiple transmission ranges. The proposed framework can serve as a baseline platform to investigate different networking problems in such systems. Further, we consider a cluster-based multihop network with fixed intra-cluster and inter-cluster transmission ranges and address the problem of designing an optimal network configuration for minimizing the data transmission in the network. We model the problem as an integer linear program, which can be applied only to networks of small sizes because of the hardness of the problem. To address the problem in large-scale networks, we design a polynomial-time approximation method using the proposed mathematical framework. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated under compression schemes based on compressive sensing.

An empirical investigation based quality of service aware transmission power prediction in low power networks

An empirical investigation based quality of service aware transmission power prediction in low power networks

Optimal joint operation of coupled transportation and power distribution urban networks

The number of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and consequently their penetration level into urban society is increasing which has imperatively reinforced the need for a joint stochastic operational planning of Transportation Network (TN) and Power Distribution Network (PDN). This paper solves a stochastic multi-agent simulation-based model with the objective of minimizing the total cost of interdependent TN and PDN systems. Capturing the temporally dynamic inter-dependencies between the coupled networks, an equilibrium solution results in optimized system cost. In addition, the impact of large-scale EV integration into the PDN is assessed through the mutual coupling of both networks by solving the optimization problems, i.e., optimal EV routing using traffic assignment problem and optimal power flow using branch flow model. Previous works in the area of joint operation of TN and PDN networks fall short in considering the time-varying and dynamic nature of all effective parameters in the coupled TN and PDN system. In this paper, a Dynamic User Equilibrium (DUE) network model is proposed to capture the optimal traffic distribution in TN as well as optimal power flow in PDN. A modified IEEE 30 bus system is adapted to a low voltage power network to examine the EV charging impact on the power grid. Our case study demonstrates the enhanced operation of the joint networks incorporating heterogeneous EV characteristics such as battery State of Charge (SoC), charging requests as well as PDN network’s marginal prices. The results of our simulations show how solving our defined coupled optimization problem reduces the total cost of the defined case study by 36% compared to the baseline scenario. The results also show a 45% improvement on the maximum EV penetration level with only minimal voltage deviation (less than 0.3%).