Attack-resistant sensor localization under realistic wireless signal fading

In a decentralized sensor network, localization process relies on the integrity of participating sensors. Existence of malicious beacon nodes in the vicinity of non-beacon nodes affects this process. This paper presents a trilateration-based secure localization technique, which is capable of estimating the location of a sensor with high accuracy so long four neighbouring beacon nodes are benign, irrespective of the number of neighbouring liars and without assuming any trust model. In realistic scenarios of wireless environment where transmitted signals attenuate randomly due to fading, the liar-tolerance level of this attack-resistant technique has to be relaxed accordingly. Superiority of this technique against the state-of-the-art has been established with extensive simulation results in terms of location estimation accuracy and liar-filtering probability. ©2010 IEEE.