A Lightweight Trust Model for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are quickly gaining popularity due to the fact that they are potentially low-cost solutions that can be used in a variety of application areas including emergency response, medical monitoring, homeland security and environmental monitoring. However, due to their wireless nature, the relevant security requirements form a quite extensive list. An important subset of their security threats can be addressed implementing a trust management system, which establishes trust relationships among the network nodes. The methods for calculating trust via concatenation and multipath propagation are referred to as trust models. For a complete estimation of such a scheme not only computational complexity, but also the level of increase of the total network throughput and the impact on energy consumption must be thoroughly examined in order to evaluate its effective applicability in AWSN networks.