A TOPSIS-based Relocalization Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

Selecting reliable beacon nodes plays a significant role for relocalizating unknown nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN). When the position of a beacon node is drifted or is spoofed, it becomes an unreliable beacon node, which would lead to a large relocalization deviation of unknown nodes in its neighbor. However, when selecting reliable beacon nodes, most relocalization algorithms only screen either drifting beacon nodes or malicious beacon nodes whose position is drifted or spoofed. This paper proposes an algorithm which can simultaneously screen drifting beacon nodes and malicious beacon nodes. The algorithm is divided into four steps. First, three indicators are introduced, where two are for describing position drifting and one is for describing position spoofing. Second, entropy method is used to weight the contributions of three indicators. Third, Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is used to construct a reliability evaluation model. Finally, using the reliability evaluation model selects reliable beacon nodes. Experimental results illustrate that the detection accuracy of drifting beacon nodes and malicious beacon nodes of the proposed algorithm is 7.5% and 8.2% higher than that of the state-of-the-art algorithms, respectively.