Loh Yin Chyuan, Mohd Salleh Bin Md Roslan, Tan Chee Chen, Abd Kadir Mahamad, Sharifah Saon, Muladi Muladi
Blackhole attacks significantly undermine the reliability of IPv6-based RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks) in Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. This paper investigates their impact through Cooja/Contiki simulations on two distinct RPL topologies. A malicious node was configured to falsify routing metrics and drop packets, and performance was evaluated using Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Packet Loss Rate (PLR), ETX, and RTmetric. Results reveal that centralised topologies suffer severe degradation, with a 12.5% PDR drop and complete failure of critical nodes, while distributed topologies exhibit higher resilience with smaller losses and more stable routing metrics. The study contributes a topology-focused analysis, demonstrating that redundancy and path diversity are key to mitigating blackhole attacks and guiding more robust RPL design for IoT networks. © 2025 IEEE.
Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Johor, Malaysia; Universitas Negeri Malang, Department of Electrical Engineering, Malang, Indonesia
