A Secure Data Aggregation Based Trust Management Approach for Dealing with Untrustworthy Motes in Sensor Network

Efficient power management is vital for increasing the life of wireless sensor networks (WSN). The main reason is that the radio transmission consumes energy approximately three times comparing to other operations. Thus, techniques such as data aggregation have been widely used in WSN to preserve energy. Despite its appealing and powerful features, data aggregation requires a high level of security as tampering with aggregating data can be suspected due to small bit errors. We propose a comprehensive trust management approach to deal with the potential dishonest and faulty motes in sensor networks. Unlike other trust management approaches, we take into account multiple properties in leveraging between positive trust and behavior uncertainty so as to yield the projection of trust which represents truster´s confidence in the trustee node to have the capability to complete the task. We comprehensively evaluate and compare trust management schemes in the sensing environment using TOSSim simulator. The results have shown that the proposed scheme is memory efficient and provides fairly accurate results allowing sensors to appropriately adjust themselves and manage to carry out their missions during normal and extreme environment.