Bilateration: An Attack-Resistant Localization Algorithm of Wireless Sensor Network

Most of the state-of-the-art localization algorithms in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to attacks from malicious or compromised network nodes, whereas the secure localization schemes proposed so far are too complex to be applied to power constrained WSNs. This paper provides a novel secure scheme “Bilateration” which is derived from multilateration but can be calculated more accurately and quickly to resolve the positions of unknown nodes without explicitly distinguishing what kind of location attacks the WSN is facing. This paper also compares Bilateration with three existing multilateration solutions that optimize the location estimation accuracy via LS, LMS and LLMS respectively in a simulated threat environment. The experiment results show that Bilateration gets the best tradeoff among estimation error, filtering ability and computational complexity.