Secure and Trust-Aware Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) are susceptible to many security threats, and because of communication, computation and delay constraints of WSNs, traditional security mechanisms cannot be used. As a consequence, several secure routing methods have been proposed during the last decade, whereas trust management models and corresponding routing protocols have also been recently suggested as an even more effective security mechanism for WSNs. In this paper, we present a detailed survey on such routing protocols along with a proper classification according to their basic features. We first distinguish between secure multipath protocols and trust evaluation based protocols. The former are then distinguished to share and non share-based ones, whereas the latter are categorized according to their cluster-based structure or not. A comprehensive analysis is presented, accompanied by proper comparison and summarization tables for the most significant ones, as well as corresponding discussion and conclusions. Main emphasis is given to their novelty, basic methodology, pros and cons, kinds of faced attacks and complexity.