Secure Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks Against Rank Attack: A Systematic Review

The Internet of Things (IoT) is witnessing massive widespread along in almost all aspects of life. IoT is defined as a network of interconnected devices applied in various environments including smart cities, transportation, health, industries, military, and agriculture. Its main purpose is to simplify the exchange and collect data from and to deployment environments. Due to their small size and cost-effectiveness, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) form one of the core technologies deployed in IoT. Yet, things interconnected with each other and exchanging data are prone to different kinds of security attacks. As a result, it is possible to compromise data while transmitted from source to destination through nodes. Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) offers only slight protection against routing attacks, but having a network with limited energy sources, processors, and memory, besides being deployed in unattended nature and hostile environment requires more scalable security measures. This paper focuses on investigating the problem of security provisioning in RPL. As such, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of security mechanisms proposed for RPL will be discussed. An extensive search was conducted on various online databases, then findings were filtered by reviewing abstracts, introduction, and conclusion. Finally, a summary of recent research work is presented. This work is important to highlight various aspects of securing RPL and get an initial insight for studying them.