A framework of trust-energy balanced procedure for cluster head selection in wireless sensor networks

The adoption of clustering network has extended the lifetime of wireless sensor networks, but it also brings new issues to the network management, including cluster head selection. A number of cluster head selection algorithms have been proposed based on either sensor energy efficiency or sensor trust assessment. The energy-based cluster head selection algorithms assume that all sensors in a cluster are trustworthy. Thus the cluster head selected by such an algorithm is the most powerful node within the cluster but may not be trustworthy in practice. Conversely, the cluster head selected by a trust-based algorithm is the most trustworthy node within the cluster but may not have sufficient power supply. This paper presents a new framework and some reasoning schemes that incorporate the candidates chosen by trust-based cluster head selection algorithms with their energy capacities in different ways for determining a new cluster head. The proposed framework and schemes are easy to implement with a little extra computing cost. Therefore, it has a great potential in wide applications in the future.