FADER: False alarm detection and recovery for trust-aware routing in wireless sensor networks

Many trust-aware routing algorithms have been proposed in order to reliably deliver data packets from sensor nodes to the base station in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where there exist inside attackers. In these approaches, a trust mechanism is adopted for each node to measure its neighbors´ trustworthiness so the node can send data packets only to the trustworthy neighbors. A false alarm occurs when a good node is considered as untrustworthy. We propose a False Alarm DEtection and Recovery (FADER) technique which enables us to identify and reuse these false alarmed nodes. By doing so, we can improve the performance of the trust-aware routing protocol in terms of many metrics such as the network lifetime, the packet delivery rate, and many routing performance measures. We have conducted extensive OPNET simulations and the results confirm these claimed advantages of our proposed FADER approach over a representative trust-aware routing algorithm. The results show that FADER is able to recover 60-70% of the false alarms without recovering any of the attackers.