Energy-efficient AI-enhanced secure routing for protecting IoT networks from advanced attacks

Abstract

This paper proposes artificial intelligence-enhanced secure routing (AIRS), a lightweight AI-enhanced secure routing protocol for internet of things (IoT) networks operating under advanced routing attacks. Unlike existing approaches that treat intrusion detection and routing separately, AIRS tightly integrates anomaly scoring into trust-aware routing decisions using a compact random forest model designed for constrained nodes. The anomaly detector is trained offline on simulated IoT traffic features and deployed for real-time inference during routing. Extensive Cooja simulations demonstrate that AIRS improves intrusion detection accuracy and packet delivery while reducing energy consumption compared to secure-RPL and trust-LEACH. The current validation is limited to simulation environments, and real-world testbed evaluation is left for future work.