Energy and trust aware mobile agent migration protocol for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Recently, the use of mobile agents in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has emerged as the topic of extensive research due to their efficient utilization of network bandwidth and energy, and flexibility of their use for different WSN applications. Most of the proposed mobile agent based schemes use static itineraries for agents׳ migration that are computed at the sink using a centralized algorithm. These centralized algorithms require global knowledge of sensor distribution, which is difficult to obtain accurately. Other issue with static itinerary based agent migration is that an agent may not move along its itinerary due to node failures or malicious node attacks. In order to solve these issues, we first propose a framework for trust evaluation to identify the malicious behavior of sensor nodes and then give a localized distributed protocol, called energy and trust aware mobile agent migration (ETMAM) protocol for periodic data gathering application. The results of our simulation study show that the ETMAM protocol is effective in improving resilience against node failures or malicious nodes attacks.