TARP: A Trust-Aware Routing Protocol for Sensor-Actuator Networks

Most routing protocols for sensor-actuator networks (SANETs) are built under the assumption that nodes normally cooperate in forwarding each other´s messages. In practice, this assumption is not realistic; SANETs are environments where nodes may or may not cooperate. For several reasons, a node may fail to operate as planned at deployment time. As a result, when actually deployed, protocols and applications may not be as efficient as expected. In this paper, we present TARP (Trust-Aware Routing Protocol), a routing protocol for sensor-actuator networks that exploits past nodes´ routing behavior and links´ quality to determine efficient paths. We implemented TARP in a TinyOS-based SANET and conducted several experiments to evaluate its performance. The obtained results confirmed that TARP achieves substantial improvements in terms of energy consumption and scalability.