Reputation-based role assignment for role-based access control in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) typically consist of large number of sensor nodes, which, depending on the application, are mostly left unattended in open environments for moderately long periods of time. Due to the wireless nature of the medium, it is quite possible that a node can be captured by an adversary, which may lead to its non-cooperative behavior or misbehavior with the rest of the nodes in the network. So, it is necessary to provide a security mechanism in the network that mandates only the authorized nodes to be able to access information. Some of the recent literature suggest using multilevel hierarchical architectures (MHA) in WSN. In such an approach, each group is assigned a task and a different role or level is assigned to nodes within a group. There exists a need for multilevel access control in these types of networks, in order to give authorization based on a node’s role – this is also called role-based access control (RBAC). In this paper, we propose a reputation-based role assigning scheme for RBAC. The main objective of this scheme is to manage reputation locally with minimum communication and delay overhead and to assign appropriate role or level to the deserved nodes in order to increase the throughput of overall network. Other parameters used in our scheme are the bootstrap time and energy. In this paper, we describe our scheme and prove its theoretical correctness. Simulation results show that our scheme leads to an increase in throughput. This scheme leads to increase in throughput by around 32% at the consumption of little more energy.