TORAS: Trustworthy Load-Balanced Opportunistic Routing for Asynchronous Duty-Cycled WSNs

Abstract

As opportunistic routing (OR) becomes more popular in low-duty wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there is a greater demand for reliable and consistent data transmission. Only efficient and secure network protocols can guarantee reliable data transmission. Existing cryptographic algorithms for WSNs are inadequate due to their excessive energy usage. Data transmission reliability, security, and consistency will be provided via trust-based OR, while utilizing less energy and limited resources. OR uses opportunistic criteria to obtain a list of potential candidates for each sender node. This study proposes a trustworthy load-balanced opportunistic routing for asynchronous duty-cycled WSNs that consist of three parts. First, four probability distributions with their average term in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OR Metric</i> are considered for balancing the load among the nodes: distance from the node to the sink, expected number of hops, node degree, and residual energy. Second, two probability distributions with their average term in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Trust Metric</i> are considered for measuring the trust factor: direct trust and recommended trust. Finally, in order to guide more data through the prioritized nodes, the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Trusted OR Metric</i> is determined by multiplying the average probability distributions of the two metrics. When compared to benchmarks, the simulation results show that the proposed protocol improves network performance in terms of energy consumption, average end-to-end delay, average throughput, packet delivery ratio, network lifetime, and detection rate.