Performance Evaluation of RPL Protocol Under Decreased and Increased Rank Attacks: A Focus on Smart Home Use-Case

The rank value of a node in Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) plays a significant role in preventing loops and route optimization. Advertising a fake rank value creates a false topology and can degrade network performance to a great extent. This manuscript aims to study the effects of increased and decreased variants of the rank attack on the RPL performance. We consider a smart home network topology to evaluate the RPL performance, and the simulation experiments are performed using the Cooja simulator. Through this study, we portray a rational analysis and discuss how the network performance can be degraded by each variant of the rank attack and the position of the attacker node in the network topology. The simulation results obtained in our work demonstrate how each variant of the rank attack can disrupt the default RPL working. We notice significant effects of both the studied rank attacks on the crucial parameters like packet overhead, average inter-packet time, packet delivery ratio and average power consumption. Researchers working in this field can take advantage of our research findings and extend their study to develop new defence mechanisms against these attacks. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.