Defending Against Increased Rank Attack on RPL in Low-Power Wireless Networks

Objective function of RPL, the routing protocol for low-power lossy networks (RPL) defines how to form an Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG). The Routing metrics and the Rank allocation to the nodes is defined by the objective function in order to maintain the acyclic nature of DAG. However, this rank characteristic of RPL can be manipulated to launch a list of attacks. These attacks can severely affect network performance especially by draining energy of network nodes. In this paper, we investigate the impact of increased rank attack when launched at critical points of network infrastructure and proposed a distributed algorithm to prevent it. Simulations are used to validate the aforesaid attack. Result shows that if critical points are selected in advance, then the impact of the attack can be reduced around 98% as compared to other path validation methods. The proposed mechanism incurs only 4.55% of additional energy.