Adaptive Data-Communication Trust Mechanism for Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we introduce Adaptive Data-Communication Trust Mechanism for clustered wireless sensor networks (ADCT) to effectively deal with compromise or malicious nodes. Unlike prior works, we propose an adaptive function to evaluate the direct trust between nodes according to the need of the application in terms of trust severity. We also consider data trust to cope with untrustworthy nodes during the data collection despite their communication capabilities. Finally, we introduce a new method to discard a malicious recommendation when building feedback at the base station or cluster-head level. Theoretical analysis shows that our trust mechanism allows a good trade-off between memory requirement and trust cooperation.