Energy-aware and secure routing with trust for disaster response wireless sensor network

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is considered as a useful alternative to provide prompt communication services in post disaster relief operations where field information is exchanged with first responders and nearby emergency centers. However, such application environments expose the nodes to physical capture, damage and misbehaviour attacks. In addition, the compromised nodes potentially increase network congestion by advertizing false information. The loss of critical information due to significant congestion and node misbehavior attacks adversely affect emergency operations. The traditional cryptographic and authentication based secure schemes can’t be adopted due to their associated cost and incapability to counter nodes misbehaviour attacks. Furthermore, existing trust based routing protocols incur high control overheads in trust estimation and dissemination; lead to high number of dead nodes due to adopted route discovery mechanism and suffer from high route instability. In this paper, we present an Energy-aware Secure Routing with Trust (ESRT) scheme that maintains a trusted environment and isolate misbehaving nodes. ESRT incorporates trust, energy, and hop counts for making routing decisions. This multi-facet routing strategy helps to balance out energy consumption among trusted nodes while routing data using shorter paths. Simulation results demonstrate improved performance of the ESRT scheme when compared to existing work.