Distributed Reputation-based Secure Localization in Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have critical applications in diverse domains like environmental monitoring and military operations like target tracking and land-mine detection where accurate location of sensors is vital. One common method of localization in literature uses a set of specialty nodes known as beacon nodes (BNs) that assist other sensor nodes (SNs) to determine their location. In BN-based models, it is critical that malicious BNs be discouraged from providing false location information. This paper proposes a novel reputationbased scheme called Distributed Reputation-based Beacon Trust System (DRBTS) for excluding malicious BNs to ensure secure localization of SNs. To the best of our knowledge, DRBTS is the first localization model to use the concept of reputation for excluding malicious BNs. In DRBTS, every BN monitors its 1-hop neighborhood for misbehaving BNs and accordingly updates the reputation of the corresponding BN in the Neighbor-ReputationTable (NRT). Each BN then publishes its NRT in its 1-hop neighborhood which the remaining BNs use as second-hand information, after it qualifies a deviation test, for updating the reputation of their neighbors. On the otherhand, SNs use the information in NRT to determine whether or not to use a given beacon’s location information based on a simple majority voting scheme.