Performance analysis of trust based geographic routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in hostile and remote environments are often lead to vulnerabilities and prone to various security attacks. These attacks can disrupt the regular network operations such that the dependable metrics of routing protocols can be seriously affected. Conventional cryptography techniques have proved their strength in communication security rather than the routing security. To achieve the routing security, numerous researchers have utilized a human behavior patten called trust. In this paper, the authors present a study on the performance of various trust based geographic routing protocols for WSNs. After studying the trust based routing protocols, the performance of these protocols are analyzed using NS-2 simulations. With the extensive simulations, it is noted that each protocol has their own advantages and limitations in discovering and isolating the malicious nodes from the routing process. Finally, with the observations from the simulations, the authors suggests extensions to the trust models to make them more robust against detecting malicious nodes.