Collaborative Lightweight Trust Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

The cooperative multi-hop communication in a remote infrastructureless networking environment poses a serious security threat for the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Because of their vulnerability to attacks, the intrinsic and demanding assignment of WSNs is security. Earlier security solutions aimed at thwarting different types of malicious threats but failed to consider the resource constrained nature of sensor nodes. The stringent resource constraints of WSNs require a lightweight trust-based routing scheme. In this paper, we propose a collaborative lightweight trust-based (CLT) routing protocol for WSNs with minimal overhead in regard to memory and energy consumption. It does not use promiscuous mode of operation to monitor the neighboring nodes for trust derivation. CLT employs a novel trust counselor that monitors and warns the neighboring nodes whose trust falls below a warning threshold. The warning message alarms a sensor node to check and correct the packet forwarding behavior to improve its trust relationship with its neighbors. Theoretical analysis and simulation results of CLT protocol demonstrate higher packet delivery ratio, higher network lifetime, lower end-to-end delay, lower memory and energy consumption than the traditional and existing trust-based routing schemes.