SeRLoc: Secure, Range-free Localization in Sensor Networks

by
Loukas Lazos

Many distributed monitoring applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) require the location information of a sensor node. We address the problem of enabling nodes of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to determine their location in an un-trusted environment, known as the secure localization problem. We propose a novel range-independent localization algorithm called SeRLoc that is well suited in resource constrained environment such as WSN. SeRLoc is a distributed algorithm based on a two-tier network architecture that allows sensors to passively determine their location without interacting with other sensors. We show that SeRLoc is robust against known attacks on WSN, such as the wormhole attack, the Sybil attack and compromise of network entities, and analytically compute the probability of success for each attack. We also compare the performance of SeRLoc with state-of-the-art range-independent localization schemes and show that SeRLoc has better performance.