An attack-resistant target localization in underwater based on consensus fusion

Target localization has been regarded as one of the most important techniques of underwater sensor networks (USNs). However, the challenges posed by weak communication, inhomogeneous medium, and openness of underwater environment make localization more difficult. With consideration of the asynchronous clock, isogradient sound speed and forging attack, this paper presents a consensus fusion -based target localization solution with USNs. The localization procedure is mainly divided into two phases, i.e., internal position estimation and external information fusion. In the first phase, the received signal strength (RSS) and the time of flight (TOF) measurements are jointly employed to develop an asynchronous localization protocol. Particularly, a ray compensation strategy is incorporated to remove the localization bias from assuming the straight-line transmission. Based on this, a consensus fusion based localization estimator is designed in the second phase to mitigate data falsification attacks introduced by malicious sensor nodes. It is worth mentioning that, the proposed localization solution in this paper can fuse the RSS and TOF measurements by the consensus interaction procedure. Furthermore, it is resistant to data falsification attacks in inhomogeneous water medium. Finally, simulation and experimental results reveal that our solution can reduce the influences of data forging attacks and improve the localization accuracy as compared with the other works.