Issues of Trust Management for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Security in mobile wireless sensor networks is challenging to achieve, as mobile wireless sensor networks have many different characteristics from wired networks such as lack of center infrastructure, vulnerable wireless links and rapid changes in topologies, etc. However, earlier studies on security issues mainly aim at utilizing cryptography and authentication, which are not only constrained by hardware resources, but also not available for the attacks from interior networks. Trust management schemes are primary supplementary means of encryption. In this paper, we give a detailed introduction to the basic architecture of trust management. Then some classical trust management schemes are analyzed and the issues of them are also discussed. At the end of this paper, we propose some future research directions on trust management for mobile wireless sensor networks.