Secure and Optimal LOADng Routing for IoT with Composite Routing Metric

Security is the one of the major challenges for routing the data between the source and destination in an Internet of Things (IoT) network. To overcome this challenge, a secure Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector—Next Generation (LOADng) Routing Protocol is proposed in this paper. As the LOADng protocol is the second version of Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol, it retains most of the basic functionality and characteristics of AODV. During the route discovery process, the cyclic shift transposition algorithm (CSTA) is used to encrypt the control packets of the LOADng protocol to improve its security. CSTA approach only derives transposition and substitution without product cipher with respect to input data. Besides this, for choosing the best probable path between the source and destination, routing metrics such as link quality Indicator (LQI), hop count (HC) and queue length (QL) are included in the control packets. The data is then securely sent using CSTA using the optimal secure path selected. Experimental Results depict that the proposed secure and optimal LOADng (SO-LOADng) using CSTA encryption obtains better throughput, delivery ratio encryption time and decryption time than the existing state-of-art approaches.