Fuzzy-Based Trust Prediction Model for Routing in WSNs

The cooperative nature of multihop wireless sensor networks (WSNs) makes it vulnerable to varied types of attacks. The sensitive application environments and resource constraints of WSNs mandate the requirement of lightweight security scheme. The earlier security solutions were based on historical behavior of neighbor but the security can be enhanced by predicting the future behavior of the nodes in the network. In this paper, we proposed a fuzzy-based trust prediction model for routing (FTPR) in WSNs with minimal overhead in regard to memory and energy consumption. FTPR incorporates a trust prediction model that predicts the future behavior of the neighbor based on the historical behavior, fluctuations in trust value over a period of time, and recommendation inconsistency. In order to reduce the control overhead, FTPR received recommendations from a subset of neighbors who had maximum number of interactions with the requestor. Theoretical analysis and simulation results of FTPR protocol demonstrate higher packet delivery ratio, higher network lifetime, lower end-to-end delay, and lower memory and energy consumption than the traditional and existing trust-based routing schemes.