Agent-Based Trust Management Model for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), these sensor nodes cooperate with each other to form a network without using any infrastructure. WSNs has a wide application. But the security of WSNs is still an issue. Traditionally cryptographic mechanisms such as authentication and encryption only address part of the problem of security in WSNs. Recently, the use of reputation and trust systems has become an important mechanism in WSNs. In this paper, we develop a distributed agent-based trust management scheme. The agent node use watchdog mechanism to observe the behavior of the sensor nodes and computes the trust rating for them. We consider packet-dropping and hello flood attack in our simulation, the simulation results and analysis show that our scheme can fast detect the malicious nodes and scale well for wireless sensor networks.