NMTLAT: A New robust mobile Multi-Target Localization and Tracking Scheme in marine search and rescue wireless sensor networks under Byzantine attack

Abstract

After a shipwreck (ship collision, explosion, disappearance, etc.), people rely on the marine search and rescue wireless sensor networks (MSR-WSNs) as one key weapon to locate and track drowning targets to save lives and assets. However, due to the complex and dynamic ocean environment, marine sensors could be captured by malicious attackers and then become Byzantine sensors. Byzantine sensors may tamper with the actual sensor data at a fixed or time-varying probability and transmit it to the data fusion center (DFC), which renders the normal localization and tracking function of the search and rescue system downgrade or even fail. To address this issue, we develop a New robust marine mobile Multi-Target LocAlization and Tracking scheme called NMTLAT by eliminating abnormal measurement data from the initial measurement data. NMTLAT works in several steps. By analyzing and mining sensors data and behavior, we firstly employ the information entropy of the system composed of a single sensor and their neighbor sensors to develop an efficient dynamic threshold based Byzantine node identification method. After migrating Byzantine sensors, the DFC utilizes sensor-aware and preprocessed marine data of the beacon or honest sensors to complete target localization and trajectory tracking. Specifically, NMTLAT consists of a novel distributed and cooperative multi-target localization and tracking algorithm using both received signal strength indication (RSSI) and priori information of sensors location. NMTLAT employs the importance sampling method to approximate the posterior probability distribution of the sensors and targets location. Furthermore, when the marine target is outside MSR-WSNs coverage, a piecewise function is utilized to characterize the likelihood of finding a drowning target in the search and rescue sea area. Finally, the Lyapunov’s second stability theorem is adopted to measure the stability of the NMTLAT. Our extensive simulation experiments validate that the NMTLAT performance is superior to existing solutions in various marine search and rescue scenarios.