Secure Trust Based Key Management Routing Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Security is always a major concern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Several trust based routing protocols are designed that play an important role in enhancing the performance of a wireless network. However they still have some disadvantages like limited energy resources, susceptibility to physical capture, and little protection against various attacks due to insecure wireless communication channels. This paper presents a secure trust based key management (STKF) routing framework that establishes a secure trustworthy route depending upon the present and past node to node interactions. This route is then updated by isolating the malicious or compromised nodes from the route, if any, and a dedicated link is created between every pair of nodes in the selected route with the help of "q" composite random key predistribution scheme (RKPS) to ensure data delivery from source to destination. The performance of trust aware secure routing framework (TSRF) is compared with the proposed routing scheme. The results indicate that STKF provides an effective mechanism for finding out a secure route with better trustworthiness than TSRF which avoids the data dropping, thereby increasing the data delivery ratio. Also the distance required to reach the destination in the proposed protocol is less hence effectively utilizing the resources.