A secure multipath reactive protocol for routing in IoT and HANETs

In numerous Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios (such as Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) or environment sensing), the ad hoc mode is widely used. Ad-hoc networks have several benefits including infrastructureless and spontaneous deployment, and the opportunity to set up temporary and dynamic networks cost-effectively. However, some of their characteristics such as the unreliability of wireless links, dynamic topology and resource constraints in energy and processing power of objects, make new protocols’ development ignore security requirements of applications in order to satisfy some quality of service. Consequently, there is a lack of standardization works in the field of secure routing among IoT devices. Furthermore, recently proposed secure routing approaches (mostly from the academic community) do not meet the current needs and requirements of secure routing for IoT applications. In this context, we propose a lightweight and secure routing scheme that combines multipath routing and trust management, that can adapt to different scenarios in the IoT environment. To analyze and evaluate our scheme, we propose a probabilistic model that considers two types of events that affect routing performance for a given node: mobility and uncooperative behavior. Based on this mathematical model, we compared the performance of our proposed routing scheme with two other multipath routing protocols namely, SMORT and DMRP. Our performance results show that our scheme is highly scalable, more efficient, and resilient compared with previous related works and is particularly suitable for insecure large and dense IoT networks.