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Simulation-based Analysis of RPL Routing Attacks and Their Impact on IoT Network Performance

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Abstract

The recent expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) owes a lot to the significant contribution of the 6LoWPAN protocol, which has been extensively employed in low-power and lossy networks. To facilitate communication in 6LoWPAN networks, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has suggested the usage of the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). Despite its usefulness, the open and restricted nature of the RPL protocol renders it susceptible to both internal and external attacks. Since IoT devices connected through the RPL protocol have limited resources like processing power, battery life, memory, and bandwidth, ensuring their security is of the utmost importance. One of the primary obstacles to IoT networks is RPL routing attacks, which disrupt the network's normal routing activities and structure. This study investigates the impact of five RPL routing attacks, namely Blackhole, Sybil, Selective Forwarding (SF), Sinkhole, DIO suppression, and DIS flooding, on the IoT networks’ performance. The study evaluated the network's performance for normal and five routing attack scenarios using numerous performance metrics including Link throughput, No. of packets generated (control and data), Sensor data throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and Delay in packet delivery. This work conducted simulations using the Tetcos NetSim v12.1 IoT network simulator tool and is the first to analyze IoT network performance under multiple routing assault scenarios with various performance measures. The analysis showed that the performance metrics of PDR, Sensor data throughput, and No. of data packets transmitted decreased significantly in attack scenarios compared to the normal scenario, with an average decreased percentage of 70%, 70%, and 39.4%, respectively. In contrast, the metrics Link throughput, Delay, and No. of control packets transmitted increased in attack scenarios compared to the normal scenario, with average values supplemented by a factor of 35, 255, and 36, respectively. Additionally, the Destination-Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) real-time formation under different scenarios was provided.

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Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Scholar, Department of ECE, Puducherry Technological University, Puducherry, India

    Raveendranadh Bokka

  2. Department of ECE, Puducherry Technological University, Puducherry, India

    Tamilselvan Sadasivam

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  2. Tamilselvan Sadasivam
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by *1Raveendranadh Bokka, 2Tamilselvan SadasivamThe first draft of the manuscript was written by *1Raveendranadh Bokkaand all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Raveendranadh Bokka.

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Bokka, R., Sadasivam, T. Simulation-based Analysis of RPL Routing Attacks and Their Impact on IoT Network Performance. J Electron Test (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-024-06106-w

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