A Distributed Fuzzy Trust‐Aware Multipath Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

ABSTRACT Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) typically comprise numerous sensor nodes alongside one or more sink. Various challenges, like node misbehavior, improper selection of peer nodes, severe resource constraints, and unbalanced energy utilization throughout the routing process of data packets, as well as inadequate fault tolerance and reliability, low throughput, potential security threats, and insecure operational environments, degrade the overall performance of WSNs. A significant solution for these issues is the implementation of secure routing mechanisms. Consequently, this paper focuses on trust management systems (TMSs) and multipath routing protocols; it proposes a distributed fuzzy trust‐aware multipath routing protocol specifically designed for homogeneous WSNs. This novel approach aims to integrate the trustworthiness of nodes within the multipath routing process. Finally, the performance of the proposed protocol has been meticulously analyzed, evaluated, and compared with other existing approaches including Shahbaz et al., IEEMARP, TARF, and SEEM routing protocols, considering a variety of parameters. For the performance analysis of them, the TRMSim‐WSN and NS‐2 simulation platforms have been selected for simulation, while Expert Choice and grey relational analysis tools have been utilized for statistical analysis. The conducted simulation experiments and statistical analysis indicate that the protocol presented in this study yields better performance; it significantly enhances the balanced and distributed consumption of network resources, scalability, throughput, fault tolerance, accuracy, average of packet loss rate, and provides more reliable paths than other protocols. However, its performance is degraded by factors such as memory consumption, computational complexities, routing overhead, and transmission delays when compared with other algorithms.