Communal Reputation and Individual Trust (CRIT) in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Deployment of wireless sensor networks in sensitive applications such as healthcare, defence, habitat monitoring and early bushfire detection requires a careful consideration. These networks are prone to security attacks due to their wireless and deployment nature. It is very likely that after deployment of the network, sensor nodes are left unattended which causes serious security concerns. Insecure wireless communication aggravates the inherent vulnerabilities of wireless sensor networks. Several countermeasures have been proposed in literature to counter the threats posed by attacks in sensor networks; however, security does not come for free. Especially for the resource limited nodes it is very costly to deploy computationally extensive security solutions. This paper studies the notion of trust in wireless sensor networks and proposes a solution based on communal reputation and individual trust (CRIT) in sensor nodes. A very important aspect which determines the viability of this study is the simulation results and performance analysis.