SummaryIn wireless sensor networks (WSNs), trusted routing path needs to be determined for guaranteeing reliable data dissemination with maximized Quality of Service (QoS). But the sensor nodes may not exhibit a cooperative behavior for the objective of conserving energy and remaining active in the network. Trust management techniques are essential for alleviating the problem of packet dropping attacks of sensor nodes that intentionally deteriorates the performance of the network. In this paper, Hybrid ELECTRE and bipolar fuzzy PROMOTHEE‐based trust management (HEBFPTM) scheme is proposed for addressing the impact of packet dropping attacks that targets on improving QoS in WSNs. This is proposed as a multi‐criteria decision analysis solution for obtaining feasible number of parameters that could be derived from the sensor nodes of the network to determine its cooperation degree in the network. This HEBFPTM is proposed with the objective of integrating the ordinal evaluation of mobile nodes into a cardinal procedure using the method of PROMETHEE to attain quantitative and qualitative analysis that aides in identifying the weights of each criterion considered for cooperation determination using pairwise comparison. It adopted three preference models using partial, complete, and outranking through intervals. It handled the problem of uncertainty using the merits of bipolar fuzzy that helped in attaining the weight of the criteria and preference functions used for ranking the sensor nodes in the routing path. The experiments of the proposed HEBFPTM achieved using ns‐2 simulator confirmed its efficacy in improving the attack detection rate by 21.38%, reduced false positive rate by 15.42%, maximized packet delivery rate of 18.94%, and reduced energy utilization of 19.84% better than the benchmarked approaches used for investigation.
