TRACE: A centralized Trust And Competence-based Energy-efficient routing scheme for wireless sensor networks

We present TRACE as a centralized TRust And Competence-based Energy-efficient routing scheme to protect wireless sensor networks from various attacks and misbehaving nodes. TRACE identifies different types of “bad” nodes that can affect the correct routing operation and the reliability of the message delivery to the sink base station (BS). TRACE aids the routing protocol functionality and makes it more efficient and secure by using a centralized approach, where the more powerful and knowledgeable sink BS processes and validates the information received from the sensor nodes and calculates the maliciousness, competence, and cooperation levels of each node. The sink BS calculates two trust values for each node - namely Data Trust and Forwarding Trust and broadcasts a list of suspicious nodes in a Trust Report. TRACE accounts for the energy requirements of the severely-constrained network nodes by detecting and isolating the problematic nodes while eliminating the power-consuming reputation inquiries and computations required by each node in a distributed approach. We present energy calculations and simulations of TRACE and show its low energy consumption, correctness, and reliability.