Geometric mean based trust management system for WSNs (GMTMS)

The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes are high-volume in number, and their deployment environment may be hazardous, unattended and/or hostile and sometimes dangerous. The traditional cryptographic and security mechanisms in WSNs cannot detect the node physical capture, and due to the malicious or selfish nodes even total breakdown of network may take place. Also, the traditional security mechanisms in WSNs requires sophisticated software, hardware, large memory, high processing speed and communication bandwidth at node. Hence, they are not sufficient for secure routing of message from source to destination in WSNs. Alternatively, trust management schemes consist a powerful tool for the detection of unexpected node behaviours (either faulty or malicious). In this paper, we propose a new geometric mean based trust management system by evaluating direct trust from the QoS characteristics (trust metrics) and indirect trust from recommendations by neighbour nodes, which allows for trusted nodes only to participate in routing.