A Comprehensive Trust-Aware Routing Protocol With Multi-Attributes for WSNs

Due to the impact of an open deployment environment, severe restrictions in power with poor hardware equipment, and a lack of centralized administration in management, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are extremely vulnerable to malicious attacks aimed at routing and other aspects. To face this problem, we propose a novel trust-aware routing protocol for WSNs which incorporates multiattributes (TRPM) of sensor nodes in terms of communication, data, energy, and recommendation. The proposed trust model relies on an improved sliding time window considering attack frequency to facilitate the discovery of malicious behaviors of attackers. Combined with effective routing detection and maintenance protocol, the performance of our solution is tested through a wide set of simulation experiments. Extensive results reveal that an average packet transfer rate of TRPM is increased by about 19% and time consumption on the routing update is shortened by about 11% in case 20% of all sensor nodes are malicious compared with other existing trust-based routing protocols.