Building a Trust-Aware Dynamic Routing Solution for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have undergone tremendous technological advances over the last few years, and a broad range of ubiquitous computing applications have been enabled in the area of distributed sensing and control. To fully achieve the potentials of WSNs, designing a reliable and secure routing mechanism becomes critical. The key innovation of this work herein described is a Trust-Aware dynamic Routing Framework (TARF), which will complement existing cryptography-based approaches. The intent of this work is to incorporate theories of trust from social networks into sensor networks, in order to provide a reliable and trustworthy routing path in the dynamic WSN environment with both system and environmental uncertainties. Here the system dynamics refer to security dynamics caused by the unknown and varying nature of the nodes which comprise the WSNs. The advantage of the proposed TARF can be summarized as follows: 1) Enhanced security by trust-aware routing, 2) Scalable, 3) advanced trust management, 4) Low overhead, and 5) Easily integrate with existing routing protocols and security solutions. BENEFIT: First, wireless sensor technologies have shown its potential for various military applications, such as surveillance awareness, intruder detection, battlefield monitoring, and target tracking. However, the increased deployment of wireless sensor technologies is facing a challenging requirement of security. The traditional view of security based on cryptography and authentication alone is not sufficient to provide a complete solution. The proposed Trust-aware routing framework will provide a complementary approach. It can be easily integrated with existing routing protocols and deployed on commercial available wireless devices. The proposed solution will have tremendous potential in sensor network related defense applications. Our technology can be integrated with the sensors and systems being developed by those prime contractors for their DoD customers. We will leverage our on-going relationships with these Prime contractors to transition our Phase II technology into the DoD applications. The market for military applications is quite large. Second, a broad range of ubiquitous computing applications has been enabled in distributed sensing and control areas, such as border network, environment monitoring, structural health monitoring, pipeline leakage detection, disaster recovery, and chemical detection. Correspondingly, there is a growing demand for secure and reliable information delivery, which is critical to the operation of the U.S. critical infrastructures, such as energy, water treatment, agriculture, and transportation systems. Our technology has significant potential for providing information delivery reliability in these applications. We believe that our technology could be integrated with communication vendor products to enhance performance in sensor networks. The size of the market is quite large and may grow rapidly with the commercial demand for network reliability and security.