Trust-aware secure routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

A trust-aware secure routing protocol (TSRP) for wireless sensor networks is proposed in this paper to defend against varieties of attacks. First, each node calculates the comprehensive trust values of its neighbors based on direct trust value, indirect trust value, volatilization factor, and residual energy to defend against black hole, selective forwarding, wormhole, hello flood, and sinkhole attacks. Second, any source node that needs to send data forwards a routing request packet to its neighbors in multi-path mode, and this continues until the sink at the end is reached. Finally, the sink finds the optimal path based on the path's comprehensive trust values, transmission distance, and hop count by analyzing the received packets. Simulation results show that TSRP has lower network latency, smaller packet loss rate, and lower average network energy consumption than ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing and trust based secure routing protocol.