A secure and QoS aware routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has emerged as useful alternative to provide prompt communication services in mission critical applications such as post disaster relief operations where reliably data delivery in timely manner is utmost important. However, unsupervised nature of such environments makes security of node vulnerable and exposes them various threats such as damage, physical capture and node's misbehavior attacks. Moreover, the data delivery with higher end-to-end delays undermines the benefits of such networks. Recently, trust aware protocols have proved their efficacy in countering node misbehavior attacks. The existing trust aware routing protocols either use single metric (trust) or composite metric (trust and hop count, trust and energy or trust and geographical information) thereby overlooking QoS requirements. Recent research has proved that there can be significant variations in wireless links such as delay, capacity and loss ratio thereby leading to high route instability. Therefore, this paper presents the Secure and QoS aware Routing Protocol (SQRP) that takes into consideration the trust and QoS parameters pertaining to link's quality (transmission rate, link capacity and loss ratio) to select an optimized end-to-end route. This multi-facet strategy helps to maintain the trusted network environment while routing the data using the links that satisfy QoS requirements. Simulation results demonstrate that SQRP achieves improved performance in terms of throughput, delay and link stability.