DLP4DA-RPL: A Distributed Lightweight Protocol for Detection and Avoidance of Discarded DIO and DAO Attacks on RPL Routing Protocol in IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) occupies the entire world in its hands. IoT devices have a resource-constrained nature known as low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). The routing protocol for LLNs (RPL) is provided by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) group to secure the IoT networks. The control messages destination-oriented directed acyclic graph (DODAG) information object (DIO) and DODAG advertisement object (DAO) play a crucial part in RPL. Attackers focused on these control messages to degrade the performance of IoT networks and slowly bring them to a halt. To overcome these problems, this article proposes a DLP4DA-RPL protocol to detect and avoid discarded DIO (DDIO) and discarded DAO (DDAO) control message attacks. The Contiki operating system simulates this proposed protocol using the Cooja simulator, and this proposed protocol is implemented in our college environment. It is inferred from the simulation and real-time results that the proposed DLP4DA-RPL protocol outperforms the existing RPL protocols, such as RPL with attacks, RPL without attacks, SecTrust-RPL, and DDoS-RPL concerning end-to-end delay, energy consumption, packet delivery ratio (PDR), throughput, and network performance.