A Survey on Trust Models for Secure Data Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)

Security is the most questing issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) now-a-days because of the various attacks on mobile nodes. Although a number of proposals have been reported concerning security in Wireless Sensor Networks, provisioning security remains a critical and challenging task. Trust is an important aspect of Wireless Sensor Networks that enables sensor nodes to cope with uncertainty and uncontrollability caused by the free will of other nodes. However due to the computational complexity constraints and excessive energy consumption, trust computation and management is a highly challenging task. Analyzing the trust level of a node has a positive influence on the confidence with which two sensor nodes communicate since an untrustworthy node can adversely affect the quality and reliability of data. A detailed survey on various trust based routing protocols and various trust computation models is presented in this paper. To boot our work, we have analyzed various works on trust dynamics like trust propagation, prediction and aggregation models, and the impact of trust on various security services and the influence of network dynamics on trust dynamics.