Reaching Trusted Byzantine Agreement in a Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Network

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous devices which use sensor nodes to monitor physical or environmental conditions cooperatively. Currently, WSNs are expected to be integrated into the internet of things (IoT), where sensor nodes join the internet dynamically and collaborate to accomplish their tasks. In the application of the IoT, WSNs can play an important role by collecting surrounding contextual and environmental information. However, ensuring a stable and reliable topology is an important issue with regard to WSNs. To cope with the influence of faulty components, it is essential to reach a common agreement in the presence of faults, before performing certain tasks. However, the Byzantine agreement (BA) problem is a fundamental issue in fault-tolerant distributed systems. To enhance the fault tolerance and reliability of the WSN, the BA problem in the cluster-based WSN (CWSN) is revisited in this study. The proposed protocol can achieve agreement on a common value among all functional nodes in a minimal number of message exchange rounds, and can tolerate a maximal number of allowable faulty components in the CWSN.