Trust and potential field-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

From the perspective of saving energy and ensuring secure routing of data transmission for wireless sensor networks, a trust and potential field-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks is proposed and evaluated in this paper. Three factors including residual energy, trust value and distance are considered in the process of credible cluster head election, and the node that is the optimal solution of cluster head election function will be the cluster head. In the stage of establishing inter-cluster routing, considering trust and potential field of candidate next hop, cluster head chooses the optimal relay as the next hop and communicate with it. Simulation results demonstrate that the protocol is more efficient than any other typical clustering algorithms in saving energy and prolonging the lifetime of networks, but also it solves secure routing problems that are caused by abnormal nodes in wireless sensor networks.