A bio-inspired secure IPv6 communication protocol for Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) with a direct internet connectivity for global access is one of the promising technologies for future communication systems. The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) based routing protocols that are currently available for IoT are prone to various vulnerabilities. Hence, the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) stored and/or communicated in IoT can easily be compromised. In this paper, we propose a Bio-inspired Secure IPv6 Communication Protocol (BSCoP) for IoT. We have enhanced the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RFC 6550) by incorporating a classification algorithm inspired by the Artificial Immune System (AIS). The AIS-based algorithm works by detecting the routing behavior of the communicating nodes in the local routing tables and classify the misbehaving nodes as non-self. With the help of the classification algorithm, we can detect excessive broadcasts and isolate them to improve power and transmission rates of the transmitted packets in a cluster of IoT nodes. The detailed experimental results show the promising performance of the proposed protocol while offering the security desired in cyberspace in terms of energy consumption and data packet rate.