Abstract
Performance and communication security in the Internet of Things (IoT) area draw a major concern for both academic and industrial communities. Indeed, an emerging number of IoT protocols are getting involved in the protocol stack, implying that the need for new security measures is also increasing. The Media Access Control (MAC) protocol Time Slot Channel Hopping (TSCH) has recently gained significant popularity thanks to its reliability and robustness. It quickly became the basis of IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6TiSCH), a complete communication stack tailored for Industrial IoT networks. In this paper, we are interested in the lack of cooperation of some network nodes, referred to as selfishness, which often leads to network performance degradation. We introduce this concept in 6TiSCH networks for the first time, and we show how they get immunized. We first define a selfishness framework, and we integrate it into the 6top Protocol (6P). Then, we introduce a fuzzy logic-based technique enabling the detection of selfish nodes, along with an anticipatory countermeasure that tells cooperative nodes how to deal with selfish neighbors. We implement and integrate the proposed algorithms into the 6TiSCH simulator, and we conduct a thorough experimental study. Simulation results show how much the latency, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and throughput are affected and how our proposal can significantly improve them.