Target Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks with Quantized Data in the Presence of Byzantine Attacks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to Byzantine attacks in which malicious sensors send wrong data to the fusion center leading to an increase in the probability of incorrect inference. This paper considers Byzantine attacks for the location estimation task in wireless sensor networks where each sensor uses a binary quantization scheme to send binary data to the fusion center. Posterior Cramer-Rao lower Bound (PCRLB) metric and Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) are used to analyze the performance of the network in the presence of Byzantine attacks. We have considered two kinds of attack strategies, independent attacks (all the malicious sensors attack a WSN independently of each other) and collaborative attacks (all the malicious sensors communicate with each other and attack the WSN in a coordinated manner). We determine the fraction of Byzantine attackers in the network above which the fusion center becomes incapable of finding the location of the target. Optimal attacking strategy for given attacking resources is also proposed.