Feasibility Study of Secure and Robust Location Determination in Current Generation of Wireless Sensor Networks

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Date

2006-01-06

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Abstract

Location Determination has been a fundamental requirement in many wireless sensor network applications. Various schemes have been proposed to solve this problem. These schemes depend on the measurement of physical quantities such as time of flight, angle of arrival, time difference of arrival and signal strength for location determination. Measurements in the real world are also affected by environmental conditions and contain unavoidable errors. Statistical techniques such as MMSE have been shown to be tolerant towards such errors. However in hostile environments, attackers can alter the measurements significantly to render these proposed schemes useless. Security mechanisms such as authentication and encryption can thwart external attacks such as eavesdropping and spoofing. However, attacks specific to location determination schemes differ from conventional security attacks and have been shown to be successful even when adequate security mechanisms are in place. Recently AR-MMSE, LMS and Voting-based schemes have been proposed to resist these attacks. A technique has also been proposed for detection of attacker nodes. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a nesC [[8] library that achieves secure and robust location determination using these techniques and provides a simple interface that can be used by high level applications. A working system was built using Cricket sensors to evaluate the feasibility of the techniques along with basic security mechanisms. We measure the tradeoffs between the time required for computation, memory consumption and the accuracy of the estimated location. We also measure the accuracy of the estimated location under various degrees of attack for both 2-dimensional and 3- dimensional scenarios. Our experimental results show that in a 2-dimensional system, even with 2 malicious Beacon Nodes out of 8, the maximum increase in error is less than 8 cm for all three techniques when the maximum error is 2 cm without any malicious Beacon Nodes. In case of 3-dimensional system with 1 malicious Beacon Node out of 8, the maximum increase is less than 20 cm with maximum error of about 10 cm when no malicious Beacon Nodes are present.

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Keywords

feasibility study, sensor networks, location determination

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Degree

MS

Discipline

Computer Science

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