Trust-Based LEACH Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The traditional security solution based on cryptography and authentication is not sufficient for wireless sensor networks, which encounters new challenges from internal attackers, and trust is recognized as a novel approach to defend against such attacks. In this paper, we propose a trust-based LEACH (low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) protocol to provide secure routing, while preserving the essential functionalities of the original protocol. The decision-making of our scheme is based on the decision trust, evaluated separately and dynamically for different decisions by basic situational trust. The situational trust is maintained by a trust management module integrated with a trust-based routing module, having novel techniques in trust update model and cluster-head-assisted monitoring control. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.