The support of multipath routing in IPv6-based internet of things

The development of IPv6-based network architectures for Internet of Things (IoT) systems is a feasible approach to widen the horizon for more effective applications, but remains a challenge. Network routing needs to be effectively addressed in such environments of scarce computational and energy resources. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specified the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Network (RPL) to provide a basic IPv6-based routing framework for IoT networks. However, the RPL design has the potential of extending its functionality to a further limit and incorporating the support of advanced routing mechanisms. These include multipath routing which has opened the doors for great improvements towards efficient energy balancing, load distribution, and even more. This paper fulfilled a need for an effective review of recent advancements in Internet of Things (IoT) networking. In particular, it presented an effective review and provided a taxonomy of the different multipath routing solutions enhancing the RPL protocol. The aim was to discover its current state and outline the importance of integrating such a mechanism into RPL to revive its potentiality to a wider range of IoT applications. This paper also discussed the latest research findings and provided some insights into plausible follow-up researches

Assessing the Impact of Mobile Attackers on RPL-based Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming ubiquitous in our daily life. IoT networks that are made up of devices low power, low memory, and low computing capability appears in many applications such as healthcare, home, agriculture. IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Network (RPL) has become a standardized routing protocol for such low-power and lossy networks in IoT. RPL establishes the best routes between devices according to the requirements of the application, which is achieved by the Objective Function (OF). Even though some security mechanisms are defined for external attackers in its RFC, RPL is vulnerable to attacks coming from inside. Moreover, the same attacks could has different impacts on networks with different OFs. Therefore, an analysis of such attacks becomes important in order to develop suitable security solutions for RPL. This study analyze RPL-specific attacks on networks using RPL's default OFs, namely Objective Function Zero (OF0) and the Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function (MRHOF). Moreover, mobile attackers could affect more nodes in a network due to their mobility. While the security solutions proposed in the literature assume that the network is static, this study takes into account mobile attackers.Comment: 11 pages,3 figures, Journa

A Survey of Limitations and Enhancements of the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks: A Focus on Core Operations

Driven by the special requirements of the Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs), the IPv6 Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL) was standardized by the IETF some six years ago to tackle the routing issue in such networks. Since its introduction, however, numerous studies have pointed out that, in its current form, RPL suffers from issues that limit its efficiency and domain of applicability. Thus, several solutions have been proposed in the literature in an attempt to overcome these identified limitations. In this survey, we aim mainly to provide a comprehensive review of these research proposals assessing whether such proposals have succeeded in overcoming the standard reported limitations related to its core operations. Although some of RPL’s weaknesses have been addressed successfully, the study found that the proposed solutions remain deficient in overcoming several others. Hence, the study investigates where such proposals still fall short, the challenges and pitfalls to avoid, thus would help researchers formulate a clear foundation for the development of further successful extensions in future allowing the protocol to be applied more widely

Simulation of the RPL Routing Protocol for IPv6 Sensor Networks: two cases studies

International audienceThe routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) was recently designed in the ROLL working group at IETF. Few simulation tools exist that enable its evaluation in order to prepare for its real deployment. In this paper, we provide a new evaluation of this protocol with two approaches using two different simulators adapted to our needs. We first evaluated the value of mobile sinks in wireless sensor networks to extend the network lifetime using a sensor network simulator, WSNet, augmented by our own RPL module. We then focus on the performance comparison of simulated sensor networks and real powerline communication networks (PLC) using the RPL capable COOJA simulator augmented by our own PLC module. In each case, we justify the simulator choice, describe the tools implemented and present the obtained results. Our studies give two new RPL evaluations and show the interest of choosing a simulation tool adapted to the targeted study with the associated software developments. As a conclusion, we demonstrated how these two case studies can be combined in a heterogeneous network architecture to extend its global lifetime