Social Milieu Oriented Routing: A New Dimension to Enhance Network Security in WSNs

• Main Authors: Lianggui Liu, Li Chen, Huiling Jia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2016-02-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: social milieu oriented routing; quality of trust; quantum annealing; quantum tunneling; WSNs
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/16/2/247

In large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs), in order to enhance network security, it is crucial for a trustor node to perform social milieu oriented routing to a target a trustee node to carry out trust evaluation. This challenging social milieu oriented routing with more than one end-to-end Quality of Trust (QoT) constraint has proved to be NP-complete. Heuristic algorithms with polynomial and pseudo-polynomial-time complexities are often used to deal with this challenging problem. However, existing solutions cannot guarantee the efficiency of searching; that is, they can hardly avoid obtaining partial optimal solutions during a searching process. Quantum annealing (QA) uses delocalization and tunneling to avoid falling into local minima without sacrificing execution time. This has been proven a promising way to many optimization problems in recently published literatures. In this paper, for the first time, with the help of a novel approach, that is, configuration path-integral Monte Carlo (CPIMC) simulations, a QA-based optimal social trust path (QA_OSTP) selection algorithm is applied to the extraction of the optimal social trust path in large-scale WSNs. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the experiment results demonstrate that QA_OSTP outperforms its heuristic opponents.