Performance Comparison of Trust Based Clustering Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining humongous attention among researchers in both academics and industrial sector around the world. WSNs have large number of application areas like health monitoring, landslide detection, earthquake detection and forest fire detection etc. All these applications are very crucial, as they may lead to various catastrophic situations. Consequently, trust management in WSNs has also emerged as an active research area these days. Since, sensors are usually dispersed in unattended areas, this make them more susceptible to different types of attacks. To ensure trusted, reliable and unaltered delivery of sensed data to the centralized controller, a trustworthy node must be selected as a head node in clustered WSNs. Hence, there is a need to adopt trust and energy aware methods to handle these security issues. This paper provides a study of different trust-based cluster head selection algorithms in clustered WSNs.