Simmelian ties and structural holes: Exploring their topological roles in forming trust for securing wireless sensor networks

Due to the nature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in open-access and error-prone wireless environments, the security issues are always crucial. The traditional security mechanisms such as Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is no longer as feasible in protecting WSN as in wired networks. The new concept of trust has emerged in recent studies as an alternative mechanism to address the security concerns in WSNs. Most recent studies on trust are mainly focused on how to model and evaluate trust so as to effectively detect, isolate, and avoid any malicious activity in the network. In this paper, we have introduced the new angle of adaptive network approach to study 'dynamics on networks' i.e., trust state transition on a network with a fixed topology or 'dynamics of networks' i.e., topological transformation of a network with no dynamic trust state changes separately so as to discover the interplay between network overlay entities' trust evaluation and its underlie topological connectivity. Inspired from the trust studies in sociology, we propose that the Simmelian tie structured networks enable more positive impact on fostering trustworthiness among sensor nodes, while structural hole characterized networks provide more opportunity for misbehaviors and have negative impact to secure WSNs. These hypothesis have been confirmed by the extensive simulation studies.