Trust Models in Wireless Sensor Networks for Defending Against Denial-of-Service Attacks: A Literature Review

Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks pose a significant threat to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and are an impediment to their mass deployment. Current research has identified trust models as a plausible defense against DoS attacks. However, most of the proposed solutions focus only on one or two specific DoS attack scenarios and provide a very limited guidance to the WSN with regard to important practical aspects such as setting up threshold configurations and weight allocation schemes. This study conducts a comparative analysis of relevant work to build a foundation for the development of robust trust models that can counter a range of different types of DoS attacks in WSNs. In particular, this study examines the required trust evidence, the methods for extracting trust evidence, and the trust evaluation techniques for developing effective trust models. The study identifies the challenges to the implementation of trust models such as the need to determine feasible threshold limits and trust metric weightings, and the need to manage the loss of trust information. In addition, this study explores link quality and node authentication as factors affecting trust evaluation and the integration of trust models with network routing protocols.