Robust Node Positioning in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Secure sensor localization is a prerequisite for many sensor networks to retrieve trustworthy data. However, most of existing node positioning systems were studied in trust environment and are therefore vulnerable to malicious attacks. In this work, we develop a robust node positioning mechanism(ROPM) to protect localization techniques from position attacks. Instead of introducing countermeasures for every possible internal or external attack, our approach aims at making node positioning system attack-tolerant by removing malicious beacons. We defeat internal attackers and external attackers by applying different strategies, which not only achieves robustness to attacks but also dramatically reduces the computation overhead. Finally, we provide detailed theoretical analysis and simulations to evaluate the proposed technique.