Routing Protocol For Low-Power Research Articles

A Novel Fuzzy Based Method to Improve the Network Lifetime in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) opens the way for many of the research areas out of which Network lifetime extension is one of the craziest research areas. Proposing a design for any sensor network routing protocol needs to concentrate on extending the network's existence. Minimizing energy consumption leads to an extension of the life of the network. Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the routing protocol designed by IETF especially which meets the necessities of the constrained environments in IoT. This research article attempts improve performance of the RPL protocol by incorporating the soft-computing techniques. Here, a fuzzy logic-based approach is used which considers DIO_MIN as the essential factor/metric to improve the performance of RPL (i.e., reducing the energy consumption). The COOJA simulator is used for performing the simulations and assessment purpose. Results obtained from this research prove that fuzzy logic can be exercised to improving routing protocol quality (i.e., RPL) in terms of energy consumption.

Performance of Static Iot Networks using RPL Objective Functions

Internet of Things, abbreviated as IoT is a network used mainly for the communication where different devices are connected for the retrieval, examination and execution of the necessary task. One of IoT’s biggest challenge is that, they are resource-constrained. Hence, it is essential to use an efficient data transmission protocol for routing. An effective routing protocol for static IoT network is the Routing protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). It is essential to assess the effectiveness of the RPL with the selection of best objective function for different static model. In this paper, the performance of different routing algorithms is compared in connection with different static topologies. Hence, the objective function’s performance is compared for different topologies i.e., Butterfly, Ring and Umbrella topologies. We consider two objective functions: namely Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function (MRHOF) and Objective Function Zero (OF0). MRHOF considers Expected Transmission Count (ETX) as its metric and the metric considered under OF0 is hop count. It is observed that the objective function OF0 performs better than MRHOF for the metric of energy and successful receiving of data.

Research on Enhancing RPL for Improved Performance in IOT Networks

RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Net- works) was developed by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) as the protocol for LLNs (low power and lossy networks) that comprise of resource constrained components such as those used in Internet of Things applications. Since then the research community and the industry have come up with many enhancements of RPL aimed at achieving a diverse range of objectives that include better performance under heavy traffic loads, higher throughput, lower packet loss, energy conservation, longer network lifetime, mobility of nodes and enhanced security. This paper presents a review of the various methods proposed to achieve these objectives. A comparative review and a taxonomy of these methods are presented in this paper. We aim to provide valuable insights into RPL and present the foundation for future works.

Route or Flood? Reliable and Efficient Support for Downward Traffic in RPL

Modern protocols for wireless sensor networks efficiently support multi-hop upward traffic from many sensors to a collection point, a key functionality enabling monitoring applications. However, the ever-evolving scenarios involving low-power wireless devices increasingly require support also for downward traffic, e.g., enabling a controller to issue actuation commands based on the monitored data. The IETF Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is among the few tackling both traffic patterns. Unfortunately, its support for downward traffic is significantly unreliable and inefficient compared to its upward counterpart. We tackle this problem by extending RPL with mechanisms inspired by opposed, yet complementary, principles. At one extreme, we retain the route-based operation of RPL and devise techniques allowed by the standard but commonly neglected by popular implementations. At the other extreme, we rely on flooding as the main networking primitive. Inspired by these principles, we define three base mechanisms, integrate them in a popular RPL implementation, analyze their individual and combined performance, and elicit the resulting tradeoffs in scalability, reliability, and energy consumption. The evaluation relies on simulation, using both real-world topologies from a smart city scenario and synthetic grid ones, as well as on testbed experiments validating our findings from simulation. Results show that the combination of all three mechanisms into a novel protocol, T-RPL (i) yields high reliability, close to the one of flooding, (ii) with a low energy consumption, similar to route-based approaches, and (iii) improves remarkably the scalability of RPL with respect to downward traffic.

The improvement of node Mobility in RPL to increase transmission efficiency

The Internet of Thing has gained interested to use for daily devices to industrial applications. Mission-critical applications such as connected car and healthcare services require real-time communications and mobility support. The 6LoWPAN protocol and IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) have become the standard for the IoT. However, the RPL protocol is unable to support the application requirement causing from the high network overhead, long message latency and high packet loss rate due to mobility. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new cost metric combining the number of hops, RSSI values, and the summation of delay to enhance RPL mobility. In addition, we define the movement notification for the mobile node to activate mobile detection and parent selection processes. Finally, we presented a comparative study of the improved RPL protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and the number of control messages. The result shows that improved RPL protocol with the new cost metrics provides a high packet delivery ratio and offers a low message latency.

Bell-X, An Opportunistic Time Synchronization Mechanism for Scheduled Wireless Sensor Networks.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is having an ever greater impact on industrial processes and the manufacturing sector, due the capabilities of massive data collection and interoperability with plant processes, key elements that are focused on the implementation of Industry 4.0. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are one of the enabling technologies of the IIoT, due its self-configuration and self-repair capabilities to deploy ad-hoc networks. High levels of robustness and reliability, which are necessary in industrial environments, can be achieved by using the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) medium access the mechanism of the IEEE 802.15.4e protocol, penalizing other features, such as network connection and formation times, given that a new node does not know, a priori, the scheduling used by the network. This article proposes a new beacon advertising approach for a fast synchronization for networks under the TSCH-Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). This new method makes it possible to speed up the connection times of new nodes in an opportunistic way, while reducing the consumption and advertising traffic generated by the network.

Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection System in RPL by Applying Stochastic and Evolutionary Game Models over IoT Environment

The rapid development of Information and Communication Technology and the growing number of devices connected to the Internet make the Internet of Things (IoT) as a promising technology for a new breed of applications. The Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a widely applied open standard protocol for IoT networks. The RPL routing is highly vulnerable to routing attacks due to the constrained nodes. The attacks on the RPL aim to disrupt the optimal protocol structure and significantly deteriorating network performance. Secure RPL routing schemes attempt to derive a high-level abstract of RPL operations through network simulation traces and apply it as a reference to differentiate the malicious behavior. The RPL specifications include all the states and transitions with its corresponding statistics. However, the malicious activities around a node enforce it to initiate the unnecessary state transition, and thus, the legitimate nodes are equally treated as malicious in dynamic IoT network scenarios. Hence, this work proposes a game theoretic model based anomaly Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to detect the RPL attacks and verify and confirm their malicious activities. This study formulates the Game models based Anomaly Intrusion Detection System (GAIDS) for RPL security. The proposed approach consists of two interrelated formulations, such as a stochastic game for attack detection and evolutionary game for attack confirmation. The stochastic game model formulates the activities of the standard RPL rules as a zero-sum stochastic game. The stochastic game estimates the payoff by observing the states, transitions between them, and their statistics. However, there is a possibility to model legitimate players as malicious, due to the nature of RPL. Thus, the proposed GAIDS scheme implements the evolutionary game theoretic framework on clustered network topology for the attack verification. By synchronizing the results of the stochastic game of neighboring players, it differentiates the legitimate players from the suspected list successfully. As a result, the GAIDS isolates the detected attackers and maintains the routing performance. The simulation results demonstrate that the detection accuracy and throughput of the proposed gaming model based anomaly IDS is substantially high and outperforms the existing scheme.

A Resource Oriented Route Selection Framework Using Contextual Information Based on Fuzzy Logic

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to have a significant impact on city’s service provisioning and make a smart city more accessible and pragmatic since the deployment of heterogeneous smart devices in each infrastructure of cities is increasing. So far, the IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is considered to fit on IoT infrastructure for achieving the expected network requirements. While RPL meets the IoT network requirements quite well, there are some issues that need to be addressed, such as adaptability to network dynamics. This issue significantly limits the use of RPL in many smart city application scenarios, such as emergency alerts with high traffic flows. As part of a smart city vision, IoT applications are becoming more diverse, which requires context-awareness in routing protocols to support the behavior of the network. To address this issue, we design an objective function that performs the route selection based on fuzzy logic techniques while using contextual information from the application. For this, we present a new context-oriented objective function (COOF) that comprises both nodes as well as link metrics. Further, we suggest two new routing metrics, known as queue fluctuation index (QFI) and residual energy index (REI), which consider the status of queue utilization and remaining energy, respectively. The metrics used are designed to respond to the dynamic needs of the network. The proposed approach has been examined and evaluated in different scenarios when compared to other similar approach and default RPL objective functions. Simulation experiments are conducted in Cooja network simulator for Contiki OS. The evaluation results show that COOF can cope with network dynamics and IoT-based smart city application requirements.

Resource oriented topology construction to ensure high reliability in IoT based smart city networks

Today, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a subject that is undergoing intense study in smart city perspective, where the quality of service is the main concern. Hence, data routing is a key challenge in such a network. So far, the routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL) is considered to fit on AMI structure for achieving the expected network requirements. However, it is not optimized, as its parent selection mechanism attracts a large number of nodes and constructs the unbalance topology that degrades the network reliability. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we propose an efficient parent selection scheme that avoids the overburdened parent. The scheme combines the multiple routing metrics to calculate the rank, and that results in the balanced topology formation, which ensures the highest reliability in the RPL based AMI network. We evaluate the proposed work by implementing in Contiki OS with Cooja simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed work provides a higher packet delivery ratio, a lower latency, and a higher throughput as compared to default RPL.

A comprehensive survey on enhancements and limitations of the RPL protocol: A focus on the objective function

The RPL routing protocol for low power and lossy networks uses the objective function (OF) to build a Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) based on a set of metrics and constraints. The OF has as the main function to select and specify the best parent or the optimal path to reach the destination. However, proposing an adequate objective function in Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) presents a substantial challenge. In this paper, we propose a survey on existing objective functions in LLNs based on a set of metrics. These metrics can define a node or/and link characteristics. We highlight the advantages and the shortcoming of each studied solution. Furthermore, we propose a classification of the used metrics and the criteria of choice. Then, we present a comparative study of the existing OFs in terms of the required performances of the RPL protocol and we provide a deep statistical analysis of all reviewed papers. Finally, we conclude our contribution by highlighting the different issues and challenges that can be exploited for future works. We believe that this survey will help LLNs researchers’ community to easily understand the objective function concept and contributes to improving RPL in this context for further relevant research works.

Sinkhole+CloneID: A hybrid attack on RPL performance and detection method

ABSTRACTDemands for the deployment of large-scale Low power and Lossy Networks (LLN) are growing these days. Internet of Things (IoT) refers to networks that communicate over Internet Protocols (IPs). Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a standard routing protocol for networks which has been exposed to a variety of attacks. Previous works have addressed those attacks; however, each study has focused on a single attack. In this work, we propose the hybrid of Sinkhole and CloneID attacks named “Sink-Clone” attack. The paper demonstrates the effect of this hybrid attack on RPL performance and evaluates it against a detection method which is inspired by previous detection methods. The hybrid attack and the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) have been simulated in Cooja simulator where the results show the impacts of the hybrid attack compared to the standalone attacks as well as the capability of the proposed IDS in detecting malicious nodes in a hybrid scenario.

An Enhanced Distributed Data Aggregation Method in the Internet of Things.

“Internet of Things (IoT)” has emerged as a novel concept in the world of technology and communication. In modern network technologies, the capability of transmitting data through data communication networks (such as Internet or intranet) is provided for each organism (e.g., human beings, animals, things, and so forth). Due to the limited hardware and operational communication capability as well as small dimensions, IoT undergoes several challenges. Such inherent challenges not only cause fundamental restrictions in the efficiency of aggregation, transmission, and communication between nodes; but they also degrade routing performance. To cope with the reduced availability time and unstable communications among nodes, data aggregation, and transmission approaches in such networks are designed more intelligently. In this paper, a distributed method is proposed to set child balance among nodes. In this method, the height of the network graph increased through restricting the degree; and network congestion reduced as a result. In addition, a dynamic data aggregation approach based on Learning Automata was proposed for Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LA-RPL). More specifically, each node was equipped with learning automata in order to perform data aggregation and transmissions. Simulation and experimental results indicate that the LA-RPL has better efficiency than the basic methods used in terms of energy consumption, network control overhead, end-to-end delay, loss packet and aggregation rates.

Battery Drain Denial-of-Service Attacks and Defenses in the Internet of Things

IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a popular routing protocol used in wireless sensor networks and in the Internet of Things (IoT). RPL was standardized by the IETF in 2012 and has been designed for devices with limited resources and capabilities. Open-source RPL implementations are supported by popular IoT operating systems (OS), such as ContikiOS and TinyOS. In this work, we investigate the possibility of battery drain Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks in the RPL implementation of ContikiOS. In particular, we use the popular Cooja simulator and implement two types of DoS attacks, particularly version number modification and “Hello” flooding. We demonstrate the impact of these attacks on the power consumption of IoT devices. Finally, we discuss potential defenses relying on distributed intrusion detection modules.

Acknowledgement Based Technique for Detection of the Wormhole Attack in RPL Based Internet of Things Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) is the advanced technology, were the constrained nodes/things (all the objects around us such as chair, home, car, keys, etc.) will be connected to the internet to form a network, for sharing and monitoring the data, remotely. RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy networks) is a routing protocol particularly designed for the constrained (low powered, low computation, less size, etc.) networks with the protocol 6LoWPAN (IPv6 Low Powered wireless Personal Area Networks). Due to the constrained behaviour of the RPL protocol, it will leads to many RPL routing attacks such as Sinkhole, Black hole, Wormhole, Selective forwarding, rank attacks, etc. This paper was focused on the Wormhole attack. The Wormhole attack will select the packets from one location and drops those packets in some other location (malicious) by forming the Tunnelling. To detect this attack here proposed and implemented a novel approach called (ADWA). Acknowledgement based technique for detection of the wormhole attack in RPL based Internet of Things networks. This approach was shown efficient results with the Telosb sky emulator nodes in the Contiki Cooja simulator, in terms of the Packet delivery ratio, delay and detection of wormhole attack.

A Survey on Congestion Control for RPL-Based Wireless Sensor Networks.

RPL (IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks) proposed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) ROLL (routing over low-power and lossy networks) working group is a de facto standard routing protocol for IoT environments. Since the standardization was proposed, RPL has been extensively improved for diverse application scenarios and environments. Congestion control is one of the most important reasons why RPL has been improved. In an LLN (low power and lossy network), congestion may even lead to network lifetime reduction. In resource-constrained networks where end-to-end congestion control is not feasible, RPL should play a more crucial role in congestion control. In this survey, we review the RPL schemes proposed for congestion control and load-balancing and discuss future research directions.

Effects of RPL objective functions on the primitive characteristics of mobile and static IoT infrastructures

The emergence of mobile IoT applications in recent years and the challenge of routing in their infrastructures have motivated scholars to propose appropriate routing mechanisms for such systems. Meanwhile, the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the standard routing protocol for IoT infrastructures. Nevertheless, RPL was mainly designed to comply with the primitive requirements of static IoT applications and it behaves poorly in confronting with the severe alterations in mobile conditions. The most important factor for such a poor behavior in mobile applications is the inappropriate design of OFs, which determine RPL’s routing policies in the network. Therefore, the functionality and efficiency of the existing OFs should be carefully studied in order to determine their downsides and to resolve them in the future OF designs. Accordingly, in this paper, due to lack of information on how OFs affect the primary requirements of IoT infrastructures in mobile and static infrastructures, we have compared and evaluated the effect of state of the art OFs on the functionality of the nodes and the network from different perspectives. Our evaluations on fixed-node IoT infrastructures have shown that OFs could affect the power consumption by up to 80%, while their impact on reliability and E2E delay would be as high as 54% and 75%, respectively. Further observations have proven that mobility would reduce OFs contribution in power consumption by more than 10% in comparison with static IoT infrastructures, while it can increase their influence on reliability and E2E delay by nearly 15% and 16%, respectively.

Routing Protocols for Low Power and Lossy Networks in Internet of Things Applications.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its applications has taken the attention of several researchers. In an effort to provide interoperability and IPv6 support for the IoT devices, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed the 6LoWPAN stack. However, the particularities and hardware limitations of networks associated with IoT devices lead to several challenges, mainly for routing protocols. On its stack proposal, IETF standardizes the RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) as the routing protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). RPL is a tree-based proactive routing protocol that creates acyclic graphs among the nodes to allow data exchange. Although widely considered and used by current applications, different recent studies have shown its limitations and drawbacks. Among these, it is possible to highlight the weak support of mobility and P2P traffic, restrictions for multicast transmissions, and lousy adaption for dynamic throughput. Motivated by the presented issues, several new solutions have emerged during recent years. The approaches range from the consideration of different routing metrics to an entirely new solution inspired by other routing protocols. In this context, this work aims to present an extensive survey study about routing solutions for IoT/LLN, not limited to RPL enhancements. In the course of the paper, the routing requirements of LLNs, the initial protocols, and the most recent approaches are presented. The IoT routing enhancements are divided according to its main objectives and then studied individually to point out its most important strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, as the main contribution, this study presents a comprehensive discussion about the considered approaches, identifying the still remaining open issues and suggesting future directions to be recognized by new proposals.

A Novel Approach for RPL Assessment Based on the Objective Function and Trickle Optimizations

The ROLL working group proposed the RPL (IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks) to respond to the requirements of low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). In this paper, we propose a new approach to assess the RPL performances based on its main components, namely, the objective function (OF) and the trickle algorithm. To this end, we compare between the RPL-EC (RPL based combined ETX and energy consumption) and the RPL-FL (RPL based on the flexible trickle algorithm). This paper compares the two implementations to assess the weight of each proposed improvement against the standard RPL. The results show that RPL performances are greatly influenced by the change of both the objective function and trickle algorithm. RPL-FL provides best values in terms of overhead, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and energy consumption, while RPL-EC acts better with the convergence time and the network lifetime compared to the standard RPL.

EMA-RPL: Energy and mobility aware routing for the Internet of Mobile Things

Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) is a new paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT) where devices are inherently mobile. While mobility enables innovative applications and allows new services, it remains a challenging issue as it causes disconnection of nodes and intermittent connectivity, which negatively impacts the network operation and performance. In addition, energy saving presents a real challenge for networks with limited resources. In this context, a new energy efficient and mobility aware routing protocol called EMA-RPL is proposed based on the well-known Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (the RPL standard). Unlike the RPL which is basically designed for static devices, EMA-RPL enables better sustaining of connectivity of mobile nodes and conserving energy. The proposed protocol integrates an enhanced mobility detection method through a continuous control of the distance between the mobile node and its attachment, a novel point of attachment prediction based on the new location of the mobile node, and an efficient replacement strategy preserving the mobile node energy. EMA-RPL overcomes and mitigates problems caused by the mobility of nodes. Simulations using Cooja/Contiki show that EMA-RPL outperforms both the RPL and its mobility aware variant (MRPL) in terms of handover delay, data loss rate, signaling cost and energy consumption.

Simulation of Routing protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks with Cooja Simulator

International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering (A UGC Approved and indexed with DOI, ICI and Approved, DPI Digital Library) is one of the leading and growing open access, peer-reviewed, monthly, and scientific research journal for scientists, engineers, research scholars, and academicians, which gains a foothold in Asia and opens to the world, aims to publish original, theoretical and practical advances in Computer Science,Information Technology, Engineering (Software, Mechanical, Civil, Electronics & Electrical), and all interdisciplinary streams of Computing Sciences. It intends to disseminate original, scientific, theoretical or applied research in the field of Computer Sciences and allied fields. It provides a platform for publishing results and research with a strong empirical component. It aims to bridge the significant gap between research and practice by promoting the publication of original, novel, industry-relevant research.