A Trust-based Security Aware Congestion Control Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Congestion in the network may result from natural causes or selfish nodes acting as catalysts. It is possible for malicious sensor nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to create congestion-like situations by sending redundant fake packets or throwing away data packets. As a result, relying solely on congestion control techniques is insufficient to assure fair delivery. It is, therefore, necessary to first prevent this adversity by separating these types of nodes from the network. Existing congestion control strategies in the literature make the erroneous assumption that all the nodes are authentic and act appropriately which is impractical. For this purpose, a Security-Aware Congestion Control (SACC) algorithm has been proposed that would not only take care of the natural mode of congestion occurrence but would also consider the case in which hostile nodes intentionally try to block packets from reaching their destination. A collaborative effort has been undertaken in this study to alleviate congestion and security challenges utilizing the lightweight energy-efficient trust-based model method. The residual energy of nodes, buffer occupancy, and packet delivery ratio of nodes these network parameters have been taken for setting up trust metrics as they play a vital role in identifying malicious behaviour as well as preventing congestion occurrence. We have also explained the strategic way of how to give weights to these metrics so as to get more accurate trust values. The proposed approach beats existing related solutions in terms of energy efficiency, congestion control, and security due to its strong capacity to withstand numerous internal attacks.