SAMP-RPL: secure and adaptive multipath RPL for enhanced security and reliability in heterogeneous IoT-connected low power and lossy networks

The Internet of things (IoT) is made up of huge sets of networked low-power devices. Regardless of the application specificities, those devices are generally tasked to provide highly important services that can be reached out through the internet. Communications with IoT networks cannot be achieved without the support of efficient underlying routing schemes. However, the constraints related to scarce resources, as well as the wireless and lossy nature of IoT networks may tremendously affect the communications reliability. Consequently, routing efficiency could be affected. Moreover, the exposure to internal and external cyber-attacks, especially those that threaten data and service availability, complicates even further routing and security missions in such a constrained context. In this paper, we propose an efficient solution that enhances both the communications reliability and security in the heterogeneous IoT-enabled low power and lossy networks. The solution relies on three variants of adaptive and secure multipath routing for IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution that deals with multipath routing security issue for RPL protocol, in IoT contexts. The proposed solution is evaluated with Cooja simulator of Contiki OS. The assessment results show obviously the effectiveness of the proposed solution for improved communication reliability and security, at low costs.