Trust based Energy aware Reactive Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have drawn a lot of attention due to broad applications in military, civilian wildlife monitoring and disaster management. Sensor networks are composed of large number of densely deployed sensor nodes with limited energy and computation. Since these nodes operate in a physically insecure environment, they are susceptible to various types of attacks. These attacks infuse malevolent packets by compromising the nodes. Various secured reactive routing protocols have been developed with the help of cryptographic techniques in order to protect the network against the compromised nodes. However the routing protocols using encryption schemes require large memory for storing the keys and more computation. Further, these protocols have been developed without the consideration of energy aware algorithm. In this paper, trust based energy aware reactive routing protocol is developed for wireless sensor networks by appending trust based mechanism in the energy aware reactive routing protocol. The performance of the proposed protocol has been evaluated and analysed in terms of delivery ratio for different number of nodes.