A trust management scheme for industrial wireless sensor networks

Security is one of the most important issues we should solve before deploying wireless sensor networks in practical applications. Compared with traditional wireless networks, the industrial environment is harsher and more complex, which has a higher requirement for network security. Although cryptographic primitives can provide the capability to resist against the attacks from the external network, they can not address the problem caused by the internal failed or compromised field devices. In this paper, we propose a trust management scheme for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks to solve this problem. By utilizing the centralized network manager, we first provide the architecture of trust management to improve the security of the network. Then a trust computation model is proposed to evaluate the trust value of field devices. Finally, we compare the performance of our scheme with some classic trust management schemes. The simulation results show that our scheme can improve the accuracy and robustness of the trust evaluation process in industrial environments and ensure the security of the network.