Trusted Routing for Resource-Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Designing a reliable and trusted routing scheme for resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a challenging task due to the lack of infrastructure and the highly dynamic network topology. To ensure trustworthy end-to-end communications between wirelessly connected sensor nodes, a considerable amount of bidirectional traffic must be relayed either between neighboring sensor nodes or between source sensor nodes and the base station. Such scenarios may lead to an added routing overhead, higher energy depletion rate and network life time minimization. The existing trusted routing protocols focus on trusted data dissemination while lacking the consideration of the restricted resources of sensor nodes and low-power radio link failures. To solve this problem, we propose a reliability-oriented routing scheme that takes into account the link reliability and residual energy of sensor nodes, thus allowing for better trustworthy data exchange, traffic balancing and network lifetime extension. Based on real test bed experiments and large-scale simulations, the attained results show the benefits stemming from the adoption of our scheme to be a reliable and energy efficient data delivery platform for potential trusted data exchange models. Our results show that the scheme is able to reduce energy consumption without affecting the connectivity of the network.