The Routing Protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) under Attack: Simulation and Analysis

Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is the underlying routing protocol of 6LoWPAN, a core communication standard for the Internet of Things. In terms of quality of service (QoS), device management, and energy efficiency, RPL beats competing wireless sensor and ad hoc routing protocols. However, several attacks could threaten the network due to the problem of unauthenticated or unencrypted control frames, centralized root controllers, compromised or unauthenticated devices. Thus, in this paper, we aim to investigate the effect of topology and Resources attacks on RPL.s efficiency. The Hello Flooding attack, Increase Number attack and Decrease Rank attack are the three forms of Resources attacks and Topology attacks respectively chosen to work on. The simulations were done to understand the impact of the three different attacks on RPL performances metrics including End-to-End Delay (E2ED), throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and average power consumption. The findings show that the three attacks increased the E2ED, decreased the PDR and the network throughput, and degrades the network’, which further raises the power consumption of the network nodes.

I. Introduction

Due to the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, internet-connected objects rise every day. In this context, the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology is a basic component of IoT. It can be defined as a network of nodes that sense and, collaboratively, control the surrounding environment as well as enable interaction between people or computers and the IoT environment [1]. A WSN consists, basically, of sensor nodes, gateways and clients. A large number of sensor nodes are randomly spread within or near the monitored area and form a network through self-organization. In addition, WSN is a type of low-power and lossy network (LLN) that can be used to monitor physical phenomena [2]. The standardized RPL (Routing Protocol for Low Power and lossy Networks) is used for routing over LLN networks. RPL is the protocol that allows IPv6 to be used over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LowPAN). It builds graph-based topologies for large-scale wireless sensor networks using distance-vector routing algorithms and the Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG). Furthermore, the Multipoint-toPoint (MP2P), Point-to-Multipoint (P2MP) and Point-to-Point (P2P) are the different traffic patterns sustained by the RPL protocol [3]. However, RPL is shown to be susceptible to a variety of attacks that can severely affect network performances.