TrustLP: A trust-based localization protocol for wireless sensor networks

Devising a protocol for computing the location of a sensor in a wireless sensor network (WSN) is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a protocol for computing the location of a sensor that is part of a WSN. The proposed protocol is based on the extent of the trust contained in the reply messages sent by the neighboring sensors that are either anchors or already localized nodes against the request messages sent by the node intending to localize itself. The proposed protocol is distributed, localized, and asynchronous. It does not require any prior knowledge of the topology of the network. The computational and communication complexities of the proposed protocol are O(E) and O(2E + V), respectively, where E is the number of links and V is the number of nodes in the network. The proposed protocol provides a significant improvement in terms of the computational and communication overhead over the existing protocols.