Hierarchical trust management for wireless sensor networks and its application to trust-based routing

Abstract

In this work, we propose a highly scalable cluster-based hierarchical trust management protocol for wireless sensor networks to effectively deal with selfish or malicious nodes. Unlike prior work, we consider multidimensional trust attributes derived from communication and social networks to evaluate the overall trust of a sensor node. Our peer-to-peer trust evaluation method leverages the cluster-based hierarchical structure for efficient communications. We develop a probability model using stochastic Petri net techniques to analyze the performance of the proposed trust management protocol. We validate the protocol design by comparing subjective trust generated as a result of protocol execution against objective trust obtained from actual node status. We apply our hierarchical trust management protocol to trust-based geographical routing as an application. Our results demonstrate that trust-based geographic routing under identified design settings can approach the ideal performance level achievable by flooding-based routing in message delivery ratio and message delay without incurring substantial message overhead. Furthermore, it can significantly outperform traditional geographic routing protocols that do not use trust concept in selecting forwarding nodes in message delivery ratio over a wide range of design parameter settings.