Survey of Trust and Reputation Models in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have faced major challenges in security. The sensor nodes are deployed in non controlled environment, facing the danger of information leakage, adversary attacks and other threats. Trust and Reputation models are required to solve this problem and to identify malicious, selfish and compromised nodes. However, Cryptography is the traditional approach to provide network security through borrowing tools and mechanisms. Reputation-based frameworks, where nodes maintain reputation of other nodes and use it to evaluate their trustworthiness are deployed to provide scalable, diverse and generalized approach to counter misbehaviors resulting from malicious and selfish nodes in the networks. This paper aims to feature of the role and importance of security aspects in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). An attempt has been made for the same by comparing some important trust and reputation models that are purely dedicated to protect the WSNs from adversary attacks and maintain the security issues. The comparison has been made with respect to accuracy and path length and founded that modified reputation models give the best accuracy in different wireless sensing modes as compared to other reputation models. Additionally, it consumes lesser path length and resources in oscillating and collusive environments.