A Reliable Approach of Establishing Trust for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which consist of spatially distributed autonomous sensing and computing devices to monitor physical conditions such as temperature and motion. Under a hostile military environment, sensor networks can be easily attacked by malicious nodes and hostile nodes using the natural cooperation of WSNs. In this paper, we introduce the trust mechanism in the human society into WSNs and propose a more overall trust model without a central trust authority, which provides a reliable approach to establish trust for WSNs. The approach combines all kinds of trust values together, including the direct trust and indirect trust value of nodes. The simulation results show that our trust model can efficiently defend against the attacks of the malicious nodes.