SecLoc - secure localization in WSNs using CDS

Originally, the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) was motivated by military applications such as battlefield surveillance and land-mine detection. Over time, however, WSNs have found a wide range of applications in diverse domains such as industrial automation and monitoring, environmental and habitat monitoring, health-care applications, home automation, traffic regulation, smart hospitals, etc. In all these domains, the data sensed by the sensor nodes are reported to a central server called a base station, which then initiates appropriate actions based on the reported data. To this end, the location of sensors is very critical since the monitored event can be detrimental causing irreversible damage – such as forest fire, if the location of sensors is compromised and/or inaccurate. In this paper, we propose SecLoc – a novel localization method for WSNs, which can be easily extended to other wireless and mobile and ad-hoc networks. The proposed method exploits the connected dominating set (CDS) property of a network graph. SecLoc, to the best of our knowledge, is the first localization model to exploit the CDS property for accurate and secure node localization in WSNs. In out proposed method, a set of specialty nodes, called the beacon nodes, with large resource base, assume the role of Dominant nodes. The beacon nodes are responsible for both accurate and secure localization of nodes. We confirm the efficiency and robustness of our model through simulation results. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.