Device-Based Asynchronous Ranging and Node Identification for Wireless Sensor Networks

A fundamental problem when locating sensors in a network is to reliably estimate the distance between pairs of sensors. Since security of sensor networks is vulnerable in the wireless environment, this paper proposes a device-based ranging and node identification scheme, which can be applied to provide secure position information for wireless sensor applications. By generalizing the asynchronous distance estimation technology (distance estimation via asynchronous clocks), a device-based distributed distance estimation method is presented. Moreover, based on the physical property of a device, the communication delay (e.g., internal component delay, difference of the clocks, and response delay) between two wireless sensors may be used to identify the normal wireless sensors, to renew the network node information, and to enhance the reliability of distance estimation. The proposed device-based asynchronous ranging and node identification algorithm is shown to be feasible for identifying malicious sensor nodes in the network and is superior to the delay attack-resilient clock synchronization scheme with regard to the successful detection rate of antinodes and ranging accuracy.