Agent-based Trusted Querying Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Corresponding to the increasing trends of using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for the daily operations in both commercial and defense sectors, designing an efficient and secure query processing mechanism becomes critical. While recent research efforts on database based query processing dramatically improves the efficiency of query processing, another critical component, security, is still missing. The key innovation of this work is an Efficient Trusted Querying Framework (ETQF), in which the trust evaluation mechanism is built to identify the trustworthy of sensor nodes, distinguish illegal/misbehaving nodes from normal sensors, and filter out bogus data in the querying process. The work is motivated from the well studied reputation and trust relations in the field of social sciences. Our main strategy here is to analyze various security breaches during the querying process, fully exploit the advantages of existing trust management mechanisms, and extend them into the WSNs. Our final goal is to develop an efficient trusted querying approach that can return the highest-fidelity response to the user while monitoring the health of the network by flagging suspected compromised nodes.