Trust based Routing – A Novel Approach for Data Security in WSN based Data Critical Applications

Wireless technology has changed the way entities communicate with one another. Wireless networks have created several opportunities in fields such as military, health care, and habitat monitoring, to name a few. However, only a few data-critical applications are built on wireless sensor networks, such as border reconnaissance, detecting infringement, and patient monitoring. These applications require the processing of a large amount of private data. Because most applications are data-sensitive, securing data transmission among wireless sensor networks is crucial. While incorporating data security, the most important requirement of wireless sensor nodes being energy optimized also need to be kept in consideration. There are various forms of assaults that are relevant in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Attacks like Black Hole attacks, sink hole attacks, False data Injection attacks etc. are the most commonly seen attacks on WSNs. The common element in all these attacks is the concept of malicious / compromised node - a node which either drops / modifies the data content while forwarding it. Existing techniques for data security generally use cryptographic algorithms, but the use of cryptographic algorithms is in contrast with the energy optimization requirement of sensor nodes. An energy efficient data security scheme needs to be developed. The proposed system analyses several attacks and proposes a multi-layer data security approach to prevent change of data / dropping of data by the compromised nodes. The proposed system is a routing protocol referred as Trust Based Routing (TBR). A concept of trust value of a node is the core idea of TBR. Forwarding node is selected based on highest trust value and thus avoid malicious / compromised nodes from being involved in the routing process. The trust factor is calculated by considering the number of packets dropped, packets rejected, and the node's remaining energy. The idea of TBR is enhanced by incorporating the concept of past trust and trust of node towards a specific destination. This proposed scheme is referred as Extended Trust Based Routing (ETBR). This scheme is further enhanced by including Direct Trust, Indirect Trust and Energy Trust concepts. This scheme is referred as Consolidated Trust Estimation – Trust Based Routing (CTE-TBR). Network Simulator NS2 is used to simulate the proposed schemes. Various network factors are compared to classic Adhoc On-Demand Vector (AODV) and newly proposed schemes. The result indicates the effectiveness of the proposed data security scheme in terms of energy efficiency and Packet Delivery ratio (PDR).