Combining trust with location information for routing in wireless sensor networks

As the applications of wireless sensor networks proliferate, the efficiency in supporting large sensor networks and offering security guarantees becomes an important requirement in the design of the relevant networking protocols. Geographical routing has been proven to efficiently cope with large network dimensions while trust management schemes have been shown to assist in defending against routing attacks. Once trust information is available for all network nodes, the routing decisions can take it into account, i.e. routing can be based on both location and trust attributes. In this paper, we investigate different ways to incorporate trust in location‐based routing schemes and we propose a novel way of balancing trust and location information. Computer simulations show that the proposed routing rule exhibits excellent performance in terms of delivery ratio, latency time and path optimality. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.