TMS‐HCW: a trust management system in hierarchical clustered wireless sensor networks

Abstract

AbstractHierarchical clustered wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually consist of many tiny sensor nodes, cluster heads, and the Sink. Problems like insecure operational environments, nodes' misbehavior, and improper selection of peer nodes lead to significantly degrade the overall performance of WSNs and their vulnerability to many attacks. In another direction, WSNs often have vital and crisis duties, and most of the traditional security mechanisms are unsuitable for them. So, security is a vital and complex requirement for WSNs to improve their performance. One significant security solution is trust management system (TMS). TMS enhances the security by verifying the untrustworthy nodes; it also improves the cooperation among nodes and increases the network performance. But, TMS is a highly challenging issue in WSNs because of high overhead and computational complexity, limited resources, nodes' high density, dynamic topology, and nodes' mobility. As a result, this paper proposes a highly scalable TMS for hierarchical clustered WSNs, called TMS‐HCW. In TMS‐HCW, each cluster head calculates the trustworthiness of its cluster's members, verifies the untrustworthy members, and removes them from the WSN's processes. TMS‐HCW is different from other existing TMSs in terms of trustworthiness calculation criteria, trustworthiness calculation procedure, and trustworthiness forecasting capability. TMS‐HCW combines the past misbehavior with the current status in a comprehensive way to obtain the robust trust values; it also uses the statistical quantitative methods with high accuracy in the trustworthiness forecasting process. The performance of TMS‐HCW is compared with the performance of Group‐based trust management scheme for clustered wireless sensor networks (GTMS) and PowerTrust TMSs; simulation results and theoretical statistical analyses indicate that TMS‐HCW is improved in terms of energy consumption, accuracy, traffic overhead, and scalability and fault tolerance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.