Design and Implementation of a Trust-Aware Routing Protocol for Large WSNs

The domain of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications is increasing widely over the last few years. As this new type of networking is characterized by severely constrained node resources, limited network resources and the requirement to operate in an ad hoc manner, implementing security functionality to protect against adversary nodes becomes a challenging task. In this paper, the authors present a trust-aware, location-based routing protocol which protects the WSN against routing attacks, and also supports large-scale WSNs deployments. The proposed solution has been shown to efficiently detect and avoid malicious nodes and has been implemented in state-of-the-art sensor nodes for a real-life test-bed. This work focuses on the assessment of the implementation cost and on the lessons learned through the design, implementation and validation process.