Unique-preorder-node Based DV-Hop Localization against Wormhole Attack for Wireless Sensor Networks

DV-Hop is a range-free localization algorithm widely applied in wireless sensor network. Wormhole attack is one of the most serious attacks on DV-Hop. Previous solutions are mainly based on location leash and time leash which need hardware support, while the rest of the mechanisms without hardware support often require a higher ratio of beacon nodes and very complex operations. In this paper, we have analyzed the impact of the wormhole attack on the DV-Hop location algorithm. When the DV-Hop is invaded by the wormhole attack, the probability of the wormhole attack tunnel to be the shortest path is the biggest of all. Then we put forward the PDWA wormhole attack detection algorithm based on the Unique Preorder Node (UPN). It analyses the number of UPN and relationship through the statistics, detects the wormhole attack nodes without hardware support, and its computational complexity is also not high. The simulation results show that our proposed location scheme can fully detect the wormhole attacker. The obtained positioning accuracy is almost the same as the DV-Hop without a wormhole attack. What’s more, after it is applied to the improved MHDV-Hop algorithm, we also achieved a perfect effect. So the results fully show that our proposed scheme can resist the influence of the wormhole attack on DV-Hop.