LOCOMO: Distance-based Localization against Malicious Beacon Nodes

Last few years have seen extensive research being done in the area of localization algorithms for wireless, ad hoc computer and sensor networks. Despite the progress in the area of efficient localization algorithms, the problem of malicious beacon nodes has not received sufficient attention. In this paper, we study the robust localization problem in the presence of such nodes. In particular, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for distributed distance-based localization in the presence of a given number of malicious nodes. To prove the sufficient condition, we propose LOCOMO, a novel and efficient distance-based localization framework that can provide a guaranteed degree of localization accuracy. This framework can be used with either a polynomial-time algorithm (which has a rigorous analysis of complexity) or a heuristic algorithm (which has practical efficiency). All the above results are extended to the 3-dimensional case. Extensive network simulation experiments demonstrate that our solution has very good localization accuracy and computational efficiency.