Trust aware routing protocol for low power and lossy network.

Abstract

RPL, routing protocol for low power and lossy network is considered as the de-facto routing protocol for the internet of things (IoT). IoT is characterized by diverse devices that interconnect with each other on a cooperative basis in order to achieve certain objectives. IoT devices are constrained in terms of memory usage, processing and power consumption. Moreover, Security in IoT networks is a challenging task that is hard to achieve because the RPL routing protocol is subject to several internal and external attacks such as dropping messages, misleading the requesting nodes, behaving inaccurately, etc. Therefore, detecting and isolating these malicious nodes leads to more reliable and secure network. In this thesis, we propose a trust aware routing protocol for low power and lossy network by adding new trustworthiness metrics during the construction and maintenance of RPL network topology. Each node updates dynamically the trust metrics of its neighbors based on its observations and its neighbors’ recommendations. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed approach through simulations. Obtained results showed that the proposed approach outperformed the existing ones when measuring parameters such as remaining energy in the network, delay, throughput, and percentage of malicious nodes detected while securing and protecting the network from attacks.