TBR: Secure Routing Design for UWSN Based on Trust Management Models

Considering the harsh and complex environments in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), where the malicious nodes exist, the secure routing design is investigated in this article. The malicious nodes are a serious threat to the security of sensor networks. This article proposes a secure routing protocol, named trust based routing (TBR), that focus on how to evaluate and find the malicious nodes and then determine the reliable routing. The core idea of TBR is that a new trust management model is designed by considering the various historical behaviors of nodes in the interaction process, which is able to assess the trust value of a node based on past behaviors between nodes and protect against potential attacks in the network. And the extra factors, such as the remained energy of nodes, the distance between nodes and the trustiness are included in the routing criterions. Finally, a strategy for selecting relay nodes is proposed based on these considerations. Simulation results show that the proposed TBR algorithm can effectively defend against attacks from inside the network and is also more efficient and reliable compared to other existing routing protocols.