A Cloud-Assisted Reliable Trust Computing Scheme for Data Collection in Internet of Things

Large number of Internet of Things (IoT) applications with intelligent sensing devices (ISDs) are combined with cloud computing to collect and process data more efficiently. However, ISDs are vulnerable to various attacks. Compromised devices may maliciously provide unreliable data to the cloud, causing damage to IoT applications. Therefore, it is a critical issue to design an effective mechanism to ensure the security of data collection in cloud computing. In this article, a cloud-assisted reliable trust computing (CRTC) scheme is proposed to identify the trust of ISDs at low cost, providing high-quality data for IoT applications. The CRTC scheme mainly includes the following parts: First, a reliable approach of obtaining the real data of ISDs at a low cost is proposed to identify the trust of ISDs. In the proposed method, ISDs fits the forwarding packets information to form inspection information (II) with a small amount of data and then sends II to inspection nodes, effectively reducing the cost of routing II. Second, an effective method of trust computing is given to evaluate the trustworthiness of ISDs based on the data and II collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Then, the aggregators are selected from high-trust ISDs to ensure secure data collection. Third, to obtain more reliable trust at lower cost, a trajectory optimization algorithm for UAV is proposed to collect as much II as possible and reduce the moving distance. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed CRTC scheme is superior to previous strategies in terms of the success rate of data collection, the speed of identifying the trust of ISDs, and the UAV's trajectory distance.