Reputation mechanism has been recently introduced into wireless sensor networks(WSNs) to overcome the deficiencies incurred by cryptography alone.Unlike most current reputation mechanisms that are based on binomial distribution and to some extent,do not give due attention to the aspect of energy constraint of WSNs,this research deduces and proves the feasibility that negative binomial distribution can well be used in the reputation update with distinctive energy-saving features.Comparison tests with respect to the energy consumption in terms of reputation computing frequencies are done between the traditional reputation method and the one in this study.Results show that our method can save more energy for the reputation update and thus can better meet the power constraints of WSNs.
In wireless sensor networks(WSNs),nodes are usually powered by batteries.Since the energy consumption directly impacts the network lifespan,energy saving is a vital issue in WSNs,especially in the designing phase of cryptographic algorithms.As a complementary mechanism,reputation has been applied to WSNs.Different from most reputation schemes that were based on beta distribution,negative multinomial distribution was deduced and its feasibility in the reputation modeling was proved.Through comparison tests with beta distribution based reputation in terms of the update computation,results show that the proposed method in this research is more energy-efficient for the reputation update and thus can better prolong the lifespan of WSNs.
