A secure trust-based protocol for hierarchical routing in wireless sensor network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) became the backbone of the internet of things (IoT). IoT applications are vital and demand specific quality of service (QoS) requirements. In addition, security has become a primary concern to provide secure communication between wireless nodes, with additional challenges related to the node’s computational resources. Particular, the design of secure and resource efficient routing protocol is a critical issue in the current deployment of WSNs. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel secure-trust aware routing protocol (ST2A) that provides secure and reliable routing. The proposed protocol establishes communication routes based on calculated trust value in joint with a novel cluster head selection algorithm in the hierarchical routing process. The proposed trust-aware routing algorithm improves the routing security in WSN and optimizes many performance metrics related to WSNs unique characteristics. The results of simulation validate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm for enhancing the network lifetime up to 18% and data delivery by 17% as compared with some state-of-the-art routing algorithms.