An Energy-Constrained Forwarding Scheme Based on Group Trustworthiness in Mobile Internet of Things

Abstract

Residual energy of devices is a key factor to determine whether Internet of Things (IoT) applications can proceed smoothly. Partnership cheating behavior of malicious nodes easily distorts the trust evaluation results only based on the one-to-one relationship between nodes, which greatly reduces the security of data transmission. To balance the excessive energy loss of mobile devices and improve the reliability of data transmission, this article proposes an energy-constrained forwarding scheme based on group trustworthiness between communities (ECF-GT) for mobile IoT, which does everything possible to increase the reliability of data forwarding by improving the accuracy of relay selection. First, it leverages nodal residual energy ratio and two common social attributes between nodes to measure the unidirectional trustworthiness between devices, and constructs the community structure by using our published <i>Dynamic Discovery of Trustworthiness Overlapping Community</i> method. Then, based on the one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many trustworthiness between nodes and/or communities, a group dynamic trustworthiness assessment method is proposed to enhance the reliability of evaluating relays. Finally, ECF-GT combines nodal residual energy and group trustworthiness to design forwarding utilities and rules. The experimental results show the effectiveness of ECF-GT. For example, when the number of malicious nodes accounts for 25&#x0025; of the total number of nodes, ECF-GT can save about 17.3&#x0025; energy on average comparing to other three well-known forwarding models on <i>Reality</i> dataset.