A Trust-Based Reliable Confident Information Coverage Model of Wireless Sensor Networks for Intelligent Transportation

Wireless sensor nodes are vulnerable to interference or intrusion, especially in the tunnel scenario of intelligent transportation, which leads to potential risks to network security and reliability. Reliable coverage can ensure data perception and transmission, which helps to strengthen the reliability and quality of service (QoS) of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Existing coverage models, such as the disc model, do not consider malicious intrusion, which still has a great gap with the realistic application scenarios. Therefore, it is urgent to study a coverage model considering network intrusion and node reliability. In this paper, a novel trust-based reliable confident information coverage (T-RCIC) model is proposed based on the confident information coverage (CIC) model and trust management. Trust management is adopted to determine whether a node is trusted, critical trusted, or malicious. If a node is identified as malicious, all its functions will be blocked. For critical trusted nodes, the trust value is utilized to determine the trust feature distance to reduce its proportion of coverage estimation. Furthermore, the reliable coverage degree (RCD) is defined to evaluate coverage reliability from node trust value and reliable coverage percentage. Simulation results indicate that the proposed model inherits the advantages of the CIC model in the spatial correlation and can effectively identify malicious nodes. The proposed T-RCIC model can significantly enhance coverage reliability.