Energy-efficient Trust-based aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often deployed in unattended and noise-prone environments and suffer from energy constraints that limit the quality and quantity of data transmission. Every decision made based on the low quality and low quantity data may have drastic consequence. Therefore, ensuring high quality of sensor data and preserving energy resources of the sensor nodes go hand in hand. In this paper, we propose ETA that is an Energy-efficient Trust based data aggregation aims to achieve reliable and energy-efficient data transmission and aggregation. We use the concept of functional reputation and trust as a means to reach reliability. Functional reputation is used to select nodes that best satisfy the criteria to be an aggregator on the basis of the quality of the node. To find out the best path from every sensor node to the aggregator we take into account the link availability and residual energy of the nodes over the path. Simulation results show that even though ETA introduces some delays, overall it outperforms the other approaches in terms of reliability and lifetime.