Trust management in IoT routing protocol

Abstract

The Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the routing protocol standardized for constrained environments such as 6LoWPAN networks, and is considered as the routing protocol of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, this protocol is subject to several internal and external attacks. In this paper, we investigate a trust management protocol in RPL. Our idea of trust management in RPL is to establish a dynamic trust relationship between the different nodes involved in routing. In fact, RPL organizes a logical representation of the network topology using control messages. In our proposed protocol, we strengthen RPL by adding a new trustworthiness metric during RPL construction and maintenance. This metric allows a node to decide whether or not to trust the other nodes during the construction of the topology.