Secure Cluster Head Election Approach Based on Trust Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are interesting technologies that play an essential role in many recent applications such as internet of things, VANET, smart grids, and activities recognition. Lately, many trust management models based on clustering architecture are proposed. Most of these models are based on the assumption of pre-establishment of clustering architecture without addressing the problem of selecting the trusty cluster head (CH). Hence, it is necessary to select the most trustworthy node as CH before applying any security models. In this paper, we are focusing on the problem of selecting the most trustworthy node as CH by incorporating the trust management technique. We inject two types of malicious nodes, the first type provides wrong information in the election process in order to become a CH and the second type sends faulty recommendations to support the former type to achieve its goal. Our model shows resilience against 30% of malicious nodes injected in the network of a total 1000 nodes. The results of the simulation indicate that our model prevents the malicious nodes to be elected as CH.