| Abstract: | Designing a safe and reliable way for communicating the messages among the devices and humans forming the Opportunistic Internet of Things network (OppIoT) has been a challenge since the broadcast mode of message sharing is used. To contribute toward addressing such challenge, this paper proposes a Random Forest Classifier (RFC)‐based safe and reliable routing protocol for OppIoT (called RFCSec) which ensures space efficiency, hash‐based message integrity, and high packet delivery, simultaneously protecting the network against safety threats viz. packet collusion, hypernova, supernova, and wormhole attacks. The proposed RFCSec scheme is composed of two phases. In the first one, the RFC is trained on real data trace, and based on the output of this training, the second phase consists in classifying the encountered nodes of a given node as belonging to one of the output classes of nodes based on their past behavior in the network. This helps in proactively isolating the malicious nodes from participating in the routing process and encourages the participation of the ones with good message forwarding behavior, low packet dropping rate, high buffer availability, and a higher probability of delivering the messages in the past. Simulation results using the ONE simulator show that the proposed RFCSec secure routing scheme is superior to the MLProph, RLProph, and CAML routing protocols, chosen as benchmarks, in terms of legitimate packet delivery, probability of message delivery, count of dropped messages, and latency in packet delivery. The out‐of‐bag error obtained is also minimal |
