Enhancing RPL for Robust and Efficient Routing in Challenging Environments

Abstract

In typical settings for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), a potentially large set of nodes operates under strict requirements concerning energy consumption and packet delivery success. If non-reliable or even malicious nodes participate, standard protocols can suffer in performance which may result in a limited functionality of the whole network. This paper addresses this issue by establishing end-to-end trust relationships among nodes with the goal to isolate malicious nodes. In order to increase the scalability towards large-scale system sizes, we extend the mechanism with an adaptive signature mechanism as basis for the trust value distribution technique. Evaluations cover a theoretical discussion and a simulation-based setting. The results show that malicious nodes can be quickly isolated. Thereby, the already low additional effort for trust can be reduced significantly compared to reference solutions.