Fuzzy Trust Protocol for Malicious Node Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used in many applications nowadays, because of its extensive usage. Due to the distinct characteristics, they are vulnerable to many attacks. To secure WSN, trust management plays a pertinent role. In trust based security model, decision is taken based on some specific behavior, and so it has uncertainty. Fuzzy logic deals with uncertainty and has tolerance of imprecise data with high power of precision. In this study, fuzzy logic based multi-attribute trust model is suggested. The proposed trust model has message success rate, elapsed time at node, correctness and fairness as trust metrics. Once the four trust values are calculated, fuzzy computational theory is applied to compute the final trust value of every node that can be anyone of low (l), medium (m) and high (h). Simulation results show that the fuzzy based multi-attribute trust evaluation outperforms weighted summation based multi-attribute trust evaluation.