Wireless Jamming Localization by Exploiting Nodes' Hearing Ranges

Jamming attacks are especially harmful when ensuring the dependability of wireless communication. Finding the position of a jammer will enable the network to actively exploit a wide range of defense strategies. Thus, in this paper, we focus on developing mechanisms to localize a jammer. We first conduct jamming effect analysis to examine how a hearing range, e.g., the area from which a node can successfully receive and decode the packet, alters with the jammer’s location and transmission power. Then, we show that the affected hearing range can be estimated purely by examining the network topology changes caused by jamming attacks. As such, we solve the jammer location estimation by constructing a least-squares problem, which exploits the changes of the hearing ranges. Compared with our previous iterativesearch-based virtual force algorithm, our proposed hearing-range-based algorithm exhibits lower computational cost (i.e., one-step instead of iterative searches) and higher localization accuracy.