A trust based secured coordination mechanism for WSAN

Wireless sensor-actor networks (WSAN) consist of a vast number of sensors and few actors. Generally, these networks are deployed in an unprotected environment to sense the physical world, and perform reliable actions on it. Hence, these networks are always susceptible to various kinds of passive and active attacks by malicious nodes. The back hole and gray hole attacks are part of active attacks. These attacks degrade the network efficiency and performance. In this paper, an efficient trust based secured coordination mechanism is proposed to counter the black hole and gray hole attacks on the delay and energy efficient routing protocol in sensor-actor networks. In the proposed mechanism, each sensor analyzes the trust level of its 1 - hop sensors based on the experience, recommendation, and knowledge. The analyzed trust value is transferred to the actor. The actor analyzes these values to identify the malicious nodes in its cluster region. The proposed trust based secured coordination mechanism (TBSC) is simulated using NS2. The performance is analyzed with respect to packet delivery ratio, average energy dissipation in the network, and average end-to-end delay. The simulation results reveal that TBSC mechanism performs well for the delay and energy efficient routing protocol compared to the existing security mechanisms.