Performance Improvement in Lightweight Security Protocol for Internet of Things Networks رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

Through various internet technology developments, the world is moving towards Internet of Things (IoT) as a prevailing application of the future of Internet. IoT is a descriptive term of a vision that everything should be connected to the internet. IoT is considered as one of the hottest research topics in computer networks in particular, and in Information Technology (IT) in general. The concept in its very basic meaning opens up wide range of opportunities for new services and new innovations. It also covers vast range of application from personal, to organizational, to industrial, agricultural, to national or even international domains. IoT has grown very rapidly during the last few years, since it is launched in 2009. This rapid growth of the field, and the mounting interest of people in its applications, is leaving large number of issues unresolved, especially at research level. One of the most critical issue has to do with delivery of secured and classified data. Many scholars are reporting vulnerabilities in IoT networks security as most protocols were inherited from the traditional low secured Internet protocols. This thesis is set to tackle the issue of securing data delivery in our case at the data link layer level. One of the basic principles on which IoT was built on is constrained resources together with complex structure of hardware, sensors, applications, and communication and networking protocols. In this research work, the consideration is given to enhancing the quality of service (QoS) provisioning at the MAC sub-layer level. The choice of the MAC sub-layer stems from the IV fact that it is responsible for the management of the access to the wireless channel. And the channel is counted as the main element in the whole network which controls the system performance. Upon analyzing the quality of services provisioning of the traditional and the most dominant MAC protocol used by IoT systems that is the CSMA/CA. We proposed several enhancement ideas to boost the delivery of the secured data over IoT. The proposed solution is divided between adaptation layer and data link layer, where the data link layer plays the main role for the network performance. The performance of proposed solution or protocol is analyzed using the best known simulation environment used by IoT, the Contiki OS, together with the Cooja simulator, which was specifically designed for IoT systems. Our proposed solution specifically targets the improvement of the quality of service (QoS) that supports the requirements of any application and uses requirements of the MAC layer. As part of the simulation environment, IPsec protocol is used to provide secure traffic. Our proposed solution for providing secured traffic is denoted as Secure Traffic Priority Differentiation (STPD), which can be readily used by IoT networks that are facing challenge in the provision of quality of service in secure traffic. Our proposed STPD algorithm is a modified version of the MAC protocol with QoS that supports a heterogeneous IoT network. The STPD is an advanced scheme to access the channel and uses a contention-base mechanism that favors high priority traffic. STPD outperforms CSMA/CA in all simulated scenarios, mainly when the number of intermediate nodes is high. Which STPD achieved improvements in transmission channel utilization with average around 25%. In regards for packets latency, STPD exhibited its V superiority with average improvements of 50% than CSMA/CA, particularly when the system deals with secured data. The third parameter, which was tested is the packet delivery ratio (PDR). Yet again, STPD showed improved PDR with an average percentage of 20% in contrast with CSMA/CA. Theses significant improvements, will definitely enhance the overall performance of the entire IoT systems, starting from source down to destination.