A Survey on the Applicability of Trust Management Systems for Wireless Sensor Networks

Trust plays an important role in human life environments and virtual organizations. In the context of a network, trust may help its elements to decide whether another member of the same network is being uncooperative or malicious. Trust becomes quite important in self-configurable and autonomous systems, such as wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, very little effort has been done in the field of trust management in WSN. On the other hand, some efforts have been made in quite related fields such as Ad-hoc and P2P networks. In this paper we give an overview of existing trust management solutions, mainly those developed for Ad-Hoc and P2P networks and, more importantly, investigate their suitability to WSN. We also provide some guidelines to aid the development of trust management systems for WSN according to the nature of these networks.