Communication Trust and Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for WSN Using D-S Theory

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) deployed in open environments make nodes prone to various security attacks due to their resource constrained nature. The compromised nodes are used to mislead the sensed data and disrupt communication, which can affect the entire decision-making system based on the sensed data. It is also possible to drain the sensor nodes energy and reduce the battery life of the networks. Trust models are the preferred mechanism to secure WSN. In this paper, the authors present communication trust and energy aware (CTEA) routing protocol that make use of the proposed trust model to mitigate the effects of badmouth and energy drain attacks. They use Dempster theory to compute communication trust and also consider the energy metric, to establish the route for data transfer. The simulation result shows that the proposed trust model increases the packet delivery ratio, residual energy, and network lifetime by mitigating the nodes misbehaviour in presence of energy drain and bad mouth attacks.