An Energy-Aware Trust and Opportunity Based Routing Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Multipath Routes Technique

Rapid developments in processors and radio technology have led to the emergence of small sensor nodes capable of communicating in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Nodes in WSN transmit data using multi-hop routing and based on cooperation with each other. This collaboration has made these types of networks vulnerable to many attacks. In order to determine the reliability of nodes in separating malicious nodes from other nodes, an intelligent trust management scheme must be used. In recent years, trust-based routing protocols and opportunistic routing have become important tools to increase WSN security and performance. In this paper, an energy-aware trust and opportunity-based routing (ETOR) algorithm is proposed with respect to a novel hybrid fitness function. This algorithm has two main steps: one is to select secure nodes based on tolerance constant and the other is to select opportunistic nodes from secure nodes to perform routing. ETOR uses the multipath routes technique with an intra-cluster and inter-cluster multi-hop communication mechanism. In addition, the optimal and secure route is selected based on a novel hybrid fitness function with the parameters of energy, trust, QoS, connectivity, distance, hop-count and network traffic. The simulation was performed by MATLAB based on evaluation criteria such as throughput, delay, detection rate, NRL, distance, energy, packet delivery ratio and network lifetime in the presence of DoS attack. The experimental results show that the evaluation criteria in ETOR have improved compared to other secure routing algorithms. In addition, the ETOR algorithm provides more optimal routes for the effective transmission than its untrusted version, i.e. the energy-aware opportunity based routing.