A trust aware routing protocol for energy constrained wireless sensor network

The reliable data delivery is a challenging task in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to dynamic and unpredictable changing behaviors of nodes. The traditional cryptographic and authentication based schemes can’t be adopted due to their associated cost and incapability to counter nodes misbehavior attacks. Recently, trust based solutions have proved to be more effective to address nodes’ misbehavior attacks. Apart from isolating misbehaving nodes, the existing trust based schemes lacks the capability to minimize link failure notifications due to transient transmission disruption which consequently give rise to frequent route breakages thereby undermining throughput and route stability. Moreover, the existing solutions give rise to high energy consumption and control overhead in pursuit of trust estimation and network-wide dissemination which not only adds to network congestion but also undermines network lifetime. In this paper, we present a Trust and Energy aware Routing Protocol (TERP) that makes use of a distributed trust model for the detection and isolation of misbehaving nodes. TERP incorporates a composite routing function that encompasses trust, residual-energy, and hop count of neighbor nodes in making routing decisions. This multi-facet routing strategy helps to balance out energy consumption among trusted nodes while routing data using shorter paths. Moreover, TERP intelligently evaluates the actual link breakage thereby avoiding unnecessary route discoveries. Simulation results demonstrate improved throughput, network lifetime and route stability of TERP when compared to existing work.