## 2 Related Work  
Network congestion and various security attacks are some of the significant challenges in resource-limited WSNs. Several conventional algorithms were put forward for energy-efficient routing in WSNs [3; 4]. However, these studies fail to examine the real-time challenges that occur because of the network congestion and malicious nodes in WSNs. Congestion-aware, trust-based, secure routing protocols in WSNs are also available in the literature [5; 7]. In this section, several clustered routing schemes designed for WSNs are discussed. [PERSON] et al. [15] focused on ensuring security in clustered industrial WSNs (IWSNs) by presenting a Secure Clustering with Fuzzy Trust evaluation and Outlier detection (SCFTO) protocol. This scheme uses a Markov chain involving two states for modeling the channel quality of the wireless medium. It deals with uncertainty in transmission by estimating trust using an Interval Type-2 (IT2) Fuzzy Logic (FL) Controller. It applies density-based outlier identifications for dynamically acquiring trust thresholds to prevent malevolent nodes from becoming CHs. It employs fuzzy-based CH selection to attain a balance between energy and security, such that a node with an increased amount of residual energy (RE) or reduced assurance on others offers a better probability of becoming the CH. The proposed scheme is capable of dealing with internal malevolent nodes offering better performance based on the number of malevolent clusters, network lifespan, attacks, and throughput. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [16] designed a trust model to examine the reliability of sensor nodes to enhance reliability and data quality and avoid damage as well as adverse effects. A reliable routing approach using a hybrid trust model is proposed to remove selfish nodes from the network. The proposed Trust-Aware Secure Routing Protocol (TASRP) involves several factors like trust, RE, and path length to offer trusted routing paths between reliable nodes involving less energy. This approach aids in selecting reliable nodes for forwarding data, involving less energy owing to its shorter paths. The proposed mechanism offers better trust, throughput, and PDR, involving less energy. [PERSON] et al. [17] propounded a Trust-Based Secure and Energy-Efficient Routing (TBSEER) protocol to deal with trust and energy in the network. This protocol determines total trust by using dynamic direct, indirect, and energy trusts that may be resilient to selective forwarding, black hole, and hello flood attacks. Furthermore, it employs a penalty scheme along with a volatilization factor for the purpose of quickly identifying malevolent nodes. The nodes compute direct trust, while the sink determines the indirect trust from direct trust sent by nodes, thus reducing the amount of energy consumed as well as congestion due to iterative computations. CHs determine reliable multi-hop paths based on total trust, thus overcoming wormhole attacks. The proposed scheme involves reduced energy, speeds up detection of malevolent nodes, and overcomes common attacks. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [18] focused on supporting reliable data transmission involving reduced energy. Trust-Centric Multi-objective Black Widow Optimization (TC-MBWO) is propounded for choosing secure CHs (SCHs) and trusted paths using MBWO. It determines reliable pathsbased on cost function factors like RE, trust, distance, as well as node degree. It supports reliable clustering as well as routing, provides resistance to malevolent nodes, and reduces the amount of energy consumed by determining the shortest paths. It offers better results in terms of the quantity of alive and dead nodes, energy consumed, throughput, and network lifespan. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [19] proposed the Secure Trust-Aware (ST2A) routing protocol, which offers reliable and trusted routing. The protocol focuses on establishing communication paths based on trust along with an efficient CH selection algorithm during hierarchical routing.