Abstract
The province of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is continuously increasing due to widespread applications, like, military, monitoring environmental conditions, and several other domains. However, trust management in the WSN is a major challenge as trust is used when cooperation between nodes becomes critical to attaining reliable communication. Therefore, a new trust-based routing algorithm is proposed for initiating secured routing. Additionally, the paper proposes Chicken-Dragonfly (CHicDra) optimization algorithm for assisting secure communication by finding the optimal cluster heads (CHs) in the network. Once the CHs are selected with Multi-Objective Taylor Crow Optimization, the trusted nodes are optimally finalized using the Joint Trust that depends on the trust parameters, like integrity factor, consistency factors, forwarding rate factor, and availability factors. The proposed CHicDra is the modification of the chicken swam optimization with dragonfly algorithm. Finally, the optimally chosen path is employed for further communications in the network, which is secure and trustworthy. The proposed CHicDra computes maximal packet delivery ratio (PDR) of 44%, throughput of 52.8%, and minimal delay of 0.344, respectively.