LDTS: A Lightweight and Dependable Trust System for Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

The resource efficiency and dependability of a trust system are the most fundamental requirements for any wireless sensor network (WSN). However, existing trust systems developed for WSNs are incapable of satisfying these requirements because of their high overhead and low dependability. In this work, we proposed a lightweight and dependable trust system (LDTS) for WSNs, which employ clustering algorithms. First, a lightweight trust decision-making scheme is proposed based on the nodes´ identities (roles) in the clustered WSNs, which is suitable for such WSNs because it facilitates energy-saving. Due to canceling feedback between cluster members (CMs) or between cluster heads (CHs), this approach can significantly improve system efficiency while reducing the effect of malicious nodes. More importantly, considering that CHs take on large amounts of data forwarding and communication tasks, a dependability-enhanced trust evaluating approach is defined for cooperations between CHs. This approach can effectively reduce networking consumption while malicious, selfish, and faulty CHs. Moreover, a self-adaptive weighted method is defined for trust aggregation at CH level. This approach surpasses the limitations of traditional weighting methods for trust factors, in which weights are assigned subjectively. Theory as well as simulation results shows that LDTS demands less memory and communication overhead compared with the current typical trust systems for WSNs.