An agent-based trust and reputation management scheme for wireless sensor networks

The operation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is functionally affected by the selfish and/or malicious network nodes; and their resource constraints complicate the design of any WSN-based protocol and application. Rating nodes' trust and reputation have proven to be an effective solution to improve security, to support decision-making and to promote node collaboration in both wired and wireless networks. However, existing approaches to trust and reputation management emphasize mostly on trust and reputation modeling and ignore the overhead problems brought by their proposed schemes. In this paper, taking into consideration the power and bandwidth constraints of WSNs, we propose a novel agent-based trust and reputation management scheme (ATRM) from a system design point of view. Our objective is to manage trust and reputation with minimal overhead in terms of extra messages and time delay. The main contribution of our work is the introduction of a localized trust and reputation management strategy, which reduces both communication cost and acquisition latency.