WRL: A wormhole-resistent localization scheme based on DV-hop for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks(WSNs), sensors' locations play a critical role in many applications. A number of localization schemes have been proposed to discover the locations of regular sensors based on a few beacon nodes, which are assumed to know their locations through GPS or manual configuration. However, the localization process is vulnerable to malicious attacks. The wormhole attack is a particularly challenging one since the adversary does not need to compromise any nodes or have access to any cryptographic keys. This paper introduces WRL, a beacon-based, wormhole-resistent localization scheme based on DV-hop propagation method. The scheme can detect wormholes without any special hardware requirements on each node more than DV-hop method has. The beacon node pairs which have detected that a wormhole link exists on the path between them will not use the stained hop counts to estimate average size for one hop, saving regular sensors being influenced by the wormhole during their location computing process. Simulation results show that the localization accuracy of WRL under wormhole attacks is almost the same with that of DV-hop in a benign circumstance.