Adaptive and dual data-communication trust scheme for clustered wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, trust management schemes are designed to preserve them against misbehavior of malicious sensor nodes. These schemes observe the behavior of nodes, check their conformity to what is expected, compute and assign them trust values, and avoid any interaction with untrustworthy nodes. In this paper, we introduce Adaptive and dual Data-Communication Trust scheme (ADCT) for clustered wireless sensor networks to effectively deal with untrustworthy nodes. Unlike prior works, we propose an adaptive trust function to assess the direct trust between nodes according to the application's requirement in terms of trust severity. We also consider data trust to cope with untrustworthy nodes during the data collection despite their communication capabilities. Moreover, we use the duality data-communication trust to deal with untrustworthy recommendations when building cluster-member's feedback at the cluster-head level. Theoretical analysis and simulation show that the trust mechanism presented in this paper provides a better cooperation with the same or even lower communication overhead compared to the latest trust management schemes proposed for clustered wireless sensor networks.