Trust Management Problem in Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Sensor network security solutions that have been proposed so far are mostly built on the assumption of a trusted environment, which is not very realistic so we need trust management before deploying any other security solution. Traditional trust management schemes that have been developed for wired and wireless ad-hoc networks are not suitable for wireless sensor networks because of higher consumption of resources such as memory and power. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight group based trust management scheme (GTMS) for distributed wireless sensor networks in which the whole group will get a single trust value. Instead of using completely centralized or distributed trust management schemes, GTMS uses hybrid trust management approach that helps in keeping minimum resource utilization at the sensor nodes.