DIS flooding attack Impact on the Performance of RPL Based Internet of Things Networks: Analysis

In recent years the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) has been used to route in the Internet of Things (IoT), because of its energy-efficient mechanisms and adaptability for different environments. The RPL protocol form a topological structure known as “Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graphs (DODAG)” from sensor nodes. A new node sends DODAG Information Solicitation (DIS) messages to join the existing DODAG network with fixed interval of time. A compromised/malicious node can utilize the above mechanism to send illegitimate DIS messages to neighboring nodes to execute routing attacks such as DIS flooding attacks. In this research paper, the simulation-based study was conducted for analysis of RPL based IoT network performance under such attacks. The evaluation was done to understand how DIS attack affects the network performance through network performance metrics like throughput, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and control packet overhead generation. The findings show that DIS flooding attack raises the overhead of the control packet, end-to-end delay, and decreases the network's throughput and packet delivery ratio and greatly degrades the efficiency of the network, which further increases the power consumption of the network nodes.