An Efficient, Robust, and Scalable Trust Management Scheme for Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are characterized by long periods of disconnected operation and fixed or irregular intervals between visits by the sink. The absence of an online trusted third party, i.e., an on-site sink, makes existing trust management schemes used in legacy wireless sensor networks not applicable to UWSNs directly. In this paper, we propose a trust management scheme for UWSNs to provide efficient, robust and scalable trust data storage. For trust data storage, we employ geographic hash table to efficiently identify data storage nodes and to significantly reduce storage cost. We demonstrate, through detailed analyses and extensive simulations, that the proposed scheme is efficient, robust, and scalable.