A Scalable Geographical Routing approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

Efficient defense against security attacks is a challenging task in the wireless sensor network environment. Due to their infrastructure-less operation and the limited node and network resources, the applicability of legacy security solutions is disputable. The situation is further aggravated as the next generation wireless sensor network become larger and larger. To cope with the network dimensions we adopt the geographical routing principle which offers high scalability due to its localized operation. To efficiently defend against the routing attacks, a distributed trust model has been designed. Once trust information is available for all network nodes, the routing decisions can take it into account, i.e. routing can be based on both location and trust attributes. We propose a novel way of balancing trust and location information. Computer simulations show that the proposed routing rule (called ATSR) exhibits excellent performance in terms of delivery ratio, latency time and path optimality. ATSR adaptively weights location, trust and energy information, allowing the system designer to shift emphasis from security to path optimality, as shown by the simulation results. Keywords-wireless sensor networks, routing, security, trust.