The Impact of Mobile DIS and Rank-Decreased Attacks in Internet of Things Networks

With a predicted 50 billion devices by the end of 2020, the Internet of things has grown exponentially in the last few years. This growth has seen an increasing demand for mobility support in low power and lossy sensor networks, a type of network characterized by several limitations in terms of their resources including CPU, memory and batter, causing manufactures to push products out to the market faster, without the necessary security features. IoT networks rely on the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Network (RPL) for communication, designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This protocol has been proven to be efficient in relation to the handling of routing in such constrained networks, However, research studies revealed that RPL was inherently designed for static networks, indicating poor handling of mobile or dynamic topologies which is worsen when introducing mobile attacker. In this paper, two IoT routing attacks are evaluated under a mobile attacker with the aim of providing a critical evaluation of the impact the attacks have on the network in comparison to the case with static attacker. The first attack is the Rank attack in which the attacker announces false routing information to its neighbour attracting them to forward their data via the attacker. The second attack is the DIS attack in which the attacker floods the network with DIS messages triggering them to reset their transmission timers and sending messages more frequently. The comparison were conducted in terms of average power consumption and also the packet delivery ratio (PDR). Based on the results collected from the simulations, it was established that when an attacking node is mobile, there’s an average increase of 36.6 in power consumption and a decrease of 14 for packet delivery ratios when compared to a static attacking node

Mobility management for IoT: a survey

IInternet of Thing (IoT) or also referred to as IP-enabled wireless sensor network (IP-WSN) has become a rich area of research. This is due to the rapid growth in a wide spectrum of critical application domains. However, the properties within these systems such as memory size, processing capacity, and power supply have led to imposing constraints on IP-WSN applications and its deployment in the real world. Consequently, IP-WSN is constantly faced with issues as the complexity further rises due to IP mobility. IP mobility management is utilized as a mechanism to resolve these issues. The management protocols introduced to support mobility has evolved from host-based to network-based mobility management protocols. The presence of both types of solutions is dominant but depended on the nature of systems being deployed. The mobile node (MN) is involved with the mobility-related signaling in host-based protocols, while network-based protocols shield the host by transferring the mobility-related signaling to the network entities. The features of the IoT are inclined towards the network-based solutions. The wide spectrum of strategies derived to achieve enhanced performance evidently displays superiority in performance and simultaneous issues such as long handover latency, intense signaling, and packet loss which affects the QoS for the real-time applications. This paper extensively reviews and discusses the algorithms developed to address the challenges and the techniques of integrating IP over WSNs, the attributes of mobility management within the IPv4 and IPv6, respectively, and special focus is given on a comprehensive review encompassing mechanisms, advantages, and disadvantages on related work within the IPv6 mobility management. The paper is concluded with the proposition of several pertinent open issues which are of high research value

Correction to: Load balancing mechanism for clustered PMIPv6 protocol

Following publication of the original article [1], an error was noticed in the article. The third author’s name was inadvertently misspelled

Load balancing mechanism for clustered PMIPv6 protocol

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has become a credible member of pertinent research areas. This is attributed mainly to its capability of enabling mobility without imposing constraints or requirements on the mobile node (MN). This MN shield is enabled due to the transferring of mobility-related signaling to a new entity, which is called Mobile Access Gateway (MAG). However, associating MNs to a specific MAG inside the PMIPv6 network increases the MAG load probability. Thus, several research have enhanced the PMIPv6 protocol to improve its basic specifications and performance. Strategies include protocols, which apply the clustering technique to enhance the overall performance of the PMIPv6 in terms of routing, scalability, lifetime, and load balancing. The load balancing mechanism is considered in the non-clustered protocols. However, this mechanism has not been adopted in clustering-based protocols. Thus, pertaining to the load and the respective assignments is critical. In this article, to address these issues, a new load balancing mechanism is proposed among MAGs for Cluster-based Proxy Mobile IPv6 (CSPMIPv6) protocol. The signaling within the CSPMIPv6 has been enhanced to support the proposed load balancing mechanism. The proposed mechanism employs the inter- and intra-domain on a frequent basis to select the best MAG among the candidate MAGs. The new mechanism has improved the performance to create an evident improvement in terms of average queuing delay, handover latencies, transmission rate, end-to-end delay, and packet loss as compared to the LBM-PMIPv6 mechanism and CSPMIPv6 protocol

Partial Pilot Allocation Scheme in Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems for Pilot Contamination Reduction

Inter-cell interference has been identified as one of the major challenges of multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO)-enabled cellular systems. This problem occurs when the same pilot sets are reused across adjacent cells to save bandwidth for data transmission. As a result, so-called pilot contamination occurs, which cannot be mitigated with an increased number of serving antennas. In this work, we proposed a partial pilot allocation scheme (PPA) to tackle the pilot contamination problem and consequently improve the uplink throughput of users in multi-cell massive MIMO systems. This was achieved by using the large-scale characteristics of the fading channel to keep users with a weak channel condition out of the effect of severe interference during the pilot allocation process. Simulation results showed that the proposed scheme outperformed both smart pilot allocation (SPA) and conventional schemes. In particular, PPA improved the uplink rate by 30% compared to the SPA—a recently proposed schema. Furthermore, our simulation results clearly showed that PPA improved the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and uplink throughput

Partial pilot allocation scheme in Multi-Cell Massive MIMO systems for pilot contamination reduction

Inter-cell interference has been identified as one of the major challenges of multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO)-enabled cellular systems. This problem occurs when the same pilot sets are reused across adjacent cells to save bandwidth for data transmission. As a result, so-called pilot contamination occurs, which cannot be mitigated with an increased number of serving antennas. In this work, we proposed a partial pilot allocation scheme (PPA) to tackle the pilot contamination problem and consequently improve the uplink throughput of users in multi-cell massive MIMO systems. This was achieved by using the large-scale characteristics of the fading channel to keep users with a weak channel condition out of the effect of severe interference during the pilot allocation process. Simulation results showed that the proposed scheme outperformed both smart pilot allocation (SPA) and conventional schemes. In particular, PPA improved the uplink rate by 30% compared to the SPA—a recently proposed schema. Furthermore, our simulation results clearly showed that PPA improved the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and uplink throughput