Secure and efficient routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks for IoT networks

Routing protocol for low power and lossy (RPL) is destined to support the specific requirements of low power and lossy networks (LLN). This type of network suffers from the problem of determining and securing a routing protocol to best suit an environment. This article aims to present a new version of the efficient and secure RPL protocol. The proposed scheme consists of two parts: i) Proposing a new objective function (OF) based RPL which combines three nodes and links metrics are: expected retransmission number (ETX), hope count (HC), and the residual energy in order to have a precise decision to choose the optimal way to the destination. ii) To securing the new efficient RPL protocol by combining an improved Diffie-Hellman (DH) algorithm for a robust key exchange model with keyed-hash message authentication code (HMAC) to ensure the authentication and integrity of RPL data exchanged. To verify the level of security, we apply a formal verification using AVISPA tool which indicate that the secure and efficient RPL (SE-RPL) achieve all security requirements. Simulation results on the Contiki platform illustrate that our proposed is more efficient in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and energy compared to others standard OF.