Combining Trust and ETX to Provide Robust Wireless Sensor Networks

Computational trust is a concept that imitates human trust relationships in technical systems. Typically, this is used to predict the estimated behaviour of interaction partners in heterogeneous and open systems. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have some of these characteristics in common. In this paper, we extend our previous method to consider trust relationships in WSNs by combining Expected Transmission Count (ETX) and trust. The goal is to improve the robustness of WSNs against malicious or unreliable nodes. Therefore, we introduce a concept that resembles forgiveness and demonstrate the potential benefit of the approach in simulations.