DRBTS: Distributed Reputation-based Beacon Trust System

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have critical applications in diverse domains like environmental monitoring and military operations where accurate location of sensors is vital. One common method of location discovery uses a set of specialty nodes known as beacon nodes (BNs) that assist other sensor nodes (SNs) to determine their location. This paper proposes a novel reputation-based scheme called distributed reputation-based beacon trust system (DRBTS) for excluding malicious BNs that provide false location information. To the best of our knowledge, DRBTS is the first model to use the concept of reputation for excluding BNs. In DRBTS, every BN monitors its 1-hop neighborhood for misbehaving BNs and accordingly updates the reputation of the corresponding BN in the neighbor-reputation-table (NRT). The BNs then publish their NRT in their 1-hop neighborhood. BNs use this second-hand information published in NRT for updating the reputation of their neighbors after it qualifies a deviation test. On the other hand, the SNs use the NRT information to determine whether or not to use a given beacon's location information, based on a simple majority voting scheme