A Dynamic Behavior Monitoring Game-Based Trust Evaluation Scheme for Clustering in Wireless Sensor Networks

A typical wireless sensor network (WSN) is often deployed in harsh or hostile environment to work in an unattended mode. It is prone to various attacks during routing process as the open wireless medium. Traditional encryption and authentication-based secure mechanisms cannot avoid the attacks from internal compromised nodes, and they also need much resource for complex computing. To conquer these problems, trust-based secure mechanism is usually used in WSNs. However, how to get the behavior evidences for trust assessment is rarely addressed to date. In this paper, we present a game theory-based dynamic behavior monitoring scheme for evidences collection in WSNs. A tradeoff between network security and energy conservation can be achieved. Based on this behavior monitoring scheme, a trust assessment mechanism is proposed, which is further integrated into cluster-based routing protocol. Simulation results show that our trust evaluation scheme can gain a higher network lifetime than full-time behavior monitoring-based trust evaluation scheme, while the performance of network security is not degraded.