New Trust Metric for RPL Routing Protocol

Establishing trust relationships between nodes participating in constructing the routing paths represents a primary security milestone to have reliable routing processes that exclude infected or selfish nodes. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks) named: Metric-based RPL Trustworthiness Scheme (MRTS) to enhance RPL security and deal with the trust inference problem. MRTS addresses trust issue during the construction and maintenance of routing paths from each node to the BR (Border Router). To handle this issue, we extend DIO (DODAG Information Object) message by introducing a new trust-based metric ERNT (Extended RPL Node Trustworthiness) and a new objective function TOF (Trust Objective Function). In fact, ERNT represents the trust values for each node within the network, and TOF demonstrates how ERNT is mapped to path cost. In MRTS all nodes collaborate to calculate ERNT by taking into account nodes’ behavior including selfishness, energy, and honesty components. We implemented our scheme by extending the distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm. Evaluation results demonstrated that the new scheme improves the security of RPL.