Blockchain-Assisted Trust-Evidence Retrieval for Secure IoT/WSN Routing in Edge-Assisted Communication Systems

Abstract

Secure routing is a critical requirement for Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that form the sensing layer of future internet and edge-assisted communication systems. Shortest-path routing alone cannot provide reliable delivery when intermediate nodes exhibit selective forwarding, malicious dropping, or inconsistent behavior. This paper presents HBTV-SR, a permissioned blockchain-assisted trust-evidence retrieval method for secure IoT/WSN routing. The proposed design keeps ordinary sensor nodes lightweight by allowing them to generate signed trust observations, while miner/gateway edge nodes verify signatures, freshness, the absence of duplicate hashes, evidence completeness, and trust-value ranges. Storage nodes maintain Merkle-rooted trust records for tamper-evident retrieval. A reproducible packet-level simulator evaluates HBTV-SR against AODV-like routing, TARF-style trust routing, a direct She et al. blockchain trust baseline, and other baselines surveyed in the literature for the same scenario. Across 30 fixed-seed Monte Carlo runs, HBTV-SR achieved 83.12% packet delivery ratio in the representative 100-node, 20% malicious-node scenario, compared with 78.21% for the She et al. baseline. The results indicate that edge-assisted ledger-backed trust retrieval improves secure routing reliability while avoiding excessive blockchain workload on constrained IoT/WSN nodes.