Combining Trust with Authentication Information for Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract-Demand for Wireless sensor network (WSN) applications increases due to the peculiar features owned by the sensor nodes in connecting real world with virtual world. Mission-critical services such as health monitoring and military insist for reporting sensed event information to the required authorities. But WSNs deployed in harsh environment suffer from unexpected changes in the link quality which severely affect the information in transit. To cope with these issues, it is essential to have efficient secure and reliable communication mechanisms. This study proposes a routing mechanism based on link quality, residual energy and authentication information owned by nodes involved in communication. Forwarding nodes are selected based on the stability of the link between consecutive nodes and remaining energy of the nodes along the path. In addition, the proposed scheme support to achieve security and privacy in communication with the help of link level authentication information shared between nodes. The Trust degree of the sensor node is computed based on the combined effort of the routing metrics. The performance is evaluated in terms of packet delivery ratio, delay and energy consumption. It was observed that proposed scheme perform well in high traffic, limited bandwidth and routing attacks performed through malicious nodes.