Trust Based Secure and Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the characteristics of limited resources and dynamic topology, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are facing two major problems: security and energy consumption. Nowadays, the trust based solutions are feasible to cope with different bad behaviors of nodes, but there still exist a variety of attacks, high energy consumption and communication congestion between nodes. Therefore, this paper proposes a new trust based secure and energy efficient routing protocol (TBSEER) to solve these problems. TBSEER calculates the comprehensive trust value through adaptive direct trust value, indirect trust value and energy trust value, which can be resistant to black hole, selective forwarding, sinkhole and hello flood attacks. Moreover, the adaptive penalty mechanism and volatilization factor are used to fast identify the malicious nodes. In addition, the nodes only need to calculate the direct trust value, and the indirect trust value is obtained by the Sink, so as to further reduce the energy consumption caused by iterative calculations. Finally, the cluster heads find the safest multi-hop routes based on the comprehensive trust value, which can actively avoid wormhole attack. The simulation results show that the proposed TBSEER reduces network energy consumption, speeds up the identification of malicious nodes, as well as resists all common attacks.