With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in the information society, network security has become the focus of attention in the field of communication networks (Wang et al. 2016). On the one hand, attacks against network nodes are endless and destructive in recent years. Network nodes are exposed to risks such as being attacked and deceived. On the other hand, most researches on information transmission services in the past were based on the ideal conditions of safe and reliable network environment (Xiao and Liu 2017). It is difficult to meet the urgent requirements of current users for trusted transmission services. Therefore, secure routing protocols have become one of the research hot-spots in the field of the IoT industry (Sun et al. 2017). The IoT is a novel paradigm that aims to bridge the gap between the physical world and its representation in the digital world (Ndibanje et al. 2014). IoT is expected to become an integrated part of the Internet in the future. IoT is defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self-configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols. Bandwidth and storage are no longer considered restricting factors in IoT applications because of the rapid development of novel information and communication technologies (Kothmayr et al. 2013). The main issue is how to achieve the trusted transmission services for IoT applications. Research on secure routing protocols includes two aspects: node security and information interaction security between nodes. The main solutions for current node security include identity authentication and trusted metrics technology based on trusted roots (Park and Kang 2015). The former uses the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) (Gang et al. 2011; Zhao 2013) as a built-in trusted root, and it is used as a starting point, combined with security start-up, data storage protection, integrity metrics, and trusted transitive, which performs step-by-step metrics, verification, and delivery to complete the node’s trusted assessment. The disadvantages are: the granularity is relatively coarse and it is difficult to effectively deal with internal attacks. For example, the Basic Input Output System (BIOS) is easily tampered, resulting in the credibility of the trusted root can not be guaranteed; On the basis of social relations, the latter makes a trusted measurement of the identity and interactive behavior of the node by evidence theory, probability theory etc, but it still needs to be optimized in the aspects of computational complexity, precision and dynamic adaptability.