Study of Security Mechanisms and Simulation Analysis of Packet Drop in RPL in Low Power Lossy Networks

Abstract

A large number of small sensor nodes or motes can be randomly distributed in any environment. These nodes communicate with each other over a low power wireless communication medium since they are severely restricted in their resources. Owing to these constraints, nodes in low power and lossy networks (LLNs) need to collaborate in order to establish a multi-hop network in which data is transmitted over several nodes to reach the sink node(s). Such communications over the radio environment are prone to various attacks, such as the RPL (Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks) Packet Drop attack, which participates in the routing process to accept packets from the neighboring motes, only to drop them instead of forwarding in the route to the destination. Such an attack is generally hard to detect and to provide defenses against. In this paper, through simulations on Contiki’s network simulator COOJA, the impact of RPL Packet Drop attack on Contiki RPL is observed for performance based on average power consumption, received packet count, expected transmission count and hop count. Based on the results, several security schemes to tackle RPL in LLN have been studied.