Trustworthiness-Based Broadcast Protocols in Wireless Networks

It is significant to deliver messages to every node in a group to realize the cooperation of the nodes in wireless networks. A node sends a message to the neighbour nodes, each of which forwards the message to the neighbour nodes in flooding protocols. Here, a huge number of messages are transmitted in a network. In multi-point relay (MPR) protocols, only a relay node forwards messages and the other leaf nodes do not forward messages in order to reduce the number of messages transmitted in networks. In this paper, we newly discuss trustworthiness concepts of a neighbour node to broadcast messages. The more trustworthy the node is, the more reliably and efficiently the node can forward messages. Trustworthy neighbour nodes are selected as relay nodes. We propose novel types of trustworthiness-based broadcast (TBR) protocols, TBR1 and TBR2 protocols. In the TBR1 protocol, trustworthy first-neighbour nodes are selected as relay nodes. In the TBR2 protocol, each second-neighbour node is connected to a trustworthy first-neighbour node. In the evaluation, electric energy consumed by a node to send messages from a node to the neighbour nodes is considered as trustworthiness of the neighbour node. We evaluate the TBR1 and TBR2 protocols and show the total electric energy consumed by nodes can be more reduced than the MPR protocol.