Enhanced Trust-Based Cluster Head Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Advancement in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in recent years led to many new protocols. Wireless sensor networks are formed by the sensor nodes, that are used very often in various fields. As a result, security is the most crucial task to be accomplished. Since the wireless sensor networks are distributed in nature, the sensor nodes are easily prone to security attacks. To address this problem, we avoid the election of a malicious or compromised node as a cluster head. We proposed an approach to elect a trustworthy cluster head. This approach also reduces the overhead in the calculation of trust for cluster head election using overhearing trust mechanism. Simulations results obtained from our approach are effective.