A testbed implementation of a trust-aware RPL routing protocol

Abstract

The RPL routing protocol has gained prominence as the standard IoT routing protocol. However, it faces like many other routing protocols diverse attacks. Many studies have been proposed to secure the RPL protocol, and simulation studies have been put forward as the main research method while testbed experiments though an authentic research and testing method has been ignored. Although Testbed experiments and simulation studies have their strengths and limitations, testbed techniques could be used as veritable validation method for simulation studies. Therefore, it becomes imperative to not only propose simulation studies on securing the RPL protocol from attacks, but to perform testbed experiments that will validate the simulation study. This study is a follow up research work to validate our simulation study, which addressed Blackhole attacks in the RPL routing protocol. It implements a testbed while embedding our Trust-based RPL protocol and the standard RPL protocol in a smart environment configuration. Based on the test experiments, we provide a proof-of-concept of the validity of our claim that our Trust-based RPL protocol provides a comprehensive defense (simulation and testbed) against Blackhole attacks.