Fast and Adaptive Mesh Access Control in Low-Power and Lossy Networks

Low-power and lossy networks (LLNs) comprised of thousands of embedded networking devices connected to the larger Internet architecture can be used in a variety of applications, leading to the emerging concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). Access control and key management in such LLN is a big challenge since authentication, authorization, and key management process involves several handshakes of large size packets over low bandwidth and high latency links through a bottlenecked LLN border router (LBR). This may result in significant wasted bandwidth and slow authentication completion time. The goal of this work is to propose a “fast and adaptive node authentication mechanism for low-power lossy networks,” called FINALLY, that solves these problems and significantly improves the efficiency and speed of mesh authentication process. We evaluate FINALLY through simulations and show that it allows devices to authenticate quickly without repeated authentication failures, reduces unnecessarily wasted transmissions, and improves the overall completion time of the authentication process.