Improving Reliability and Reducing Overhead in Low-Power Sensor Networks Using Trust and Forgiveness

Wireless sensor networks operate in open environments with potentially rough conditions. The utilised protocols to implement routing decisions in such networks are typically designed to work under challenging external influences. In this paper, we focus on the most popular representative, the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), and propose a set of techniques to improve the routing schemes. We transfer the concepts of computational trust and forgiveness as known from the Organic Computing domain and equip participating nodes with dynamic decision schemes to choose interaction partners in RPL. We evaluate the different concepts in simulations with changing topological structure and different attacks. Based on this setting, we identify which concept promises the highest benefit and outline how this can be utilised in RPL.