A Reliable and Efficient Approach of Establishing Trust for Wireless Sensor Networks

Securing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in a fully self-organized way is effective and light-weight, but traditional trust mechanisms can't efficiently provide a security for sensor nodes with resources limited in many applications, especially in a complex and varying military environment, sensor networks can be easily attacked by malicious and hostile nodes using the natural cooperation characteristic of WSNs. In this paper, we introduce the trust mechanism in the human society into WSNs and propose a trust evaluation model, which provides a reliable and efficient 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, which efficiently and reliably identify the trustworthiness of nodes to defend against the attacks of malicious and hostile nodes.