A trustworthy data collection scheme based on active spot-checking in UAV-Assisted WSNs

Abstract

The UAV-WSN systems integrates the flexibility of UAVs with the communication and sensing capabilities of WSNs, making them important means of information monitoring, collection, and analysis in various fields that has received widespread attention. However, various malicious attacks pose threats to the security of UAV-WSN systems, resulting in serious vulnerabilities in trustworthy data collection. Therefore, in this article, we propose an Active Spot-Checking-based Trustworthy Data Collection (ASC-DC) scheme, which makes the following main contributions: (1) A novel UAV-assisted active and verifiable node trust evaluation framework is proposed. It includes an active trust acquisition mechanism based on spot-checked factors of nodes and a node trustworthy interaction mechanism based on Authoritative Information Tables (AIT). Through actively spot-check nodes using UAV, this framework can rapidly and accurately evaluate node trustworthiness while assisting sensor nodes in establishing trust relationships quickly. (2) A layered trust computation model is proposed, where the primary trust computation and node security supervision tasks are offloaded to more powerful UAV, thereby reducing information congestion and node energy consumption caused by trust evaluation in the WSN. (3) An improved Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is proposed to efficiently acquire UAV’s spot-checking flight trajectories. It reduces the cost of spot-checking nodes using UAV and improves the efficiency of trust verification. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ASC-DC scheme can accurately evaluate node trustworthiness in an efficient way, ensuring reliable data collection in UAV-WSN systems.