An Efficient Packet Reachability-Based Trust Management Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Introduction

Recent few years has witnessed an unpredictable growth in wireless communication technology. The wireless networks are categorized into two types such as infrastructure-based network and infrastructure less network. A wireless sensors network (WSN) is a type of infrastructure less network and group of small devices, known as sensor nodes. These nodes cooperate with other nodes to gather information from the environment. These tiny sensor nodes are composed of different modules viz; sensing module used for monitoring the environment, processing module for performing data processing, a communication module for transmitting data between sensor nodes, and power supply are used for energy. The architecture of a sensor node is depicted in Figure 9.1. A WSN is a resource constraint network. The network consists of nodes that are low cost, low processing power, limited energy, and limited storage capacity [1].

WSNs have gained significant amount of attraction from researchers in the field of academics as well as industrial communities. A WSN supports

Figure 9.1 Architecture of sensor.

Table 9.1 WSN issues and challenges

mobile communication requirements. For example, in industrial electronics, a sensor can be used for collecting and observing the data [2]. WSNs also have applications in many other fields such as health monitoring, intelligent building,

transportation, environmental surveillance, on-field sensing, and processing of signals and data aggregation. Table 9.1 shows the various issues and challenges in WSNs. The security in the sensor network is highly important not only for transferring the reliable data from sensor devices to distant sink but also for maintaining the network availability. Security is needed to ensure that the information which is sent from a sensor node is exactly the same which is received by the destination. By using different security approaches in the WSN, we may ensure that the sensor node data remain confidential when some attack occurs during the transmission.

Thus, the data service is available in the network even the network is under attack. Thus, providing security in WSNs, we can get up-to-date data from the sensing field. WSN security needs data confidentiality, authentication, data integrity, availability, robustness, access control, and key management schemes. The solutions of security in WSNs include scalable, strong, lightweight, efficient, and effective key management and key distribution mechanisms and authentication. A WSN uses a single shared key which is insecure because an attacker can easily acquire the secret key. So, WSNs can establish the environment to distribute the key by using key management schemes [12].

WSN is vulnerable to various threats like internal threats and external threats. This threat causes the power exhaustion, network failure, information theft, intruder attacks, and many more. The solutions of security in the WSN include simple, robust, strong, low complexity, and efficient trust management. The WSN uses direct and indirect trust to secure themselves. To provide safe communication, the node should mitigate the malicious nodes with the help of the trust and reputation of the target node. Trust and reputation management should secure WSN applications and must provide scalability, authenticity, integrity confidentiality, and flexibility [13]. Several trust management models are proposed in the WSN. The nodes must calculate the trust value of other nodes. The trust value is updated dynamically and has more weight on recent transactions. The calculation of trust solely depends upon the packet transaction among nodes. The cluster head plays as a recommendation manager which helps to calculate the indirect trust of any node. In this paper, we propose a packet reachability-based trust management scheme that applies to WSN communication which has constraints like storage, power, and computation. The main contributions of the paper are as follows:

• • Study of salient features of existing trust management schemes.
• • Generate and distribute trust values with the help of packet reachability of each node.
• • Time lapses function is used to calculate direct trust while recommendation-based feedback is used to calculate indirect trust.
• • Simulation has been carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed work.

The remaining part of this paper is arranged as follows. Section 9.2 presents the background of this paper while Section 9.3 gives the various works in the related area of the trust calculation. The proposed method of reachability-based trust calculation is discussed in Section 9.4. Section 9.5 describes the performance evaluation. Finally, the concluding remarks with future directions are presented in Section 9.6.