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Determining the position of a jammer using a virtual-force iterative approach

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Abstract

Wireless communication is susceptible to radio interference and jamming attacks, which prevent the reception of communications. Most existing anti-jamming work does not consider the location information of radio interferers and jammers. However, this information can provide important insights for networks to manage its resource in different layers and to defend against radio interference. In this paper, we investigate issues associated with localizing jammers in wireless networks. In particular, we formulate the jamming effects using two jamming models: region-based and signal-to-noise-ratio(SNR)-based; and we categorize network nodes into three states based on the level of disturbance caused by the jammer. By exploiting the states of nodes, we propose to localize jammers in wireless networks using a virtual-force iterative approach. The virtual-force iterative localization scheme is a range-free position estimation method that estimates the position of a jammer iteratively by utilizing the network topology. We have conducted experiments to validate our SNR-based jamming model and performed extensive simulation to evaluate our approach. Our simulation results have showed that the virtual-force iterative approach is highly effective in localizing a jammer in various network conditions when comparing to existing centroid-based localization approaches.

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Acknowledgments

Preliminary results of this paper have been presented in part in IEEE SPEUCS 2007 [35] and IEEE PWN 2009 [36]. The work was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grants CNS-0845671 and CNS-0954020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of ECE, Stevens Institute of Technology, Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken, NJ, 07030, USA

    Hongbo Liu & Yingying Chen

  2. Department of CSE, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Zhenhua Liu & Wenyuan Xu

Authors
  1. Hongbo Liu
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  2. Zhenhua Liu
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  3. Yingying Chen
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  4. Wenyuan Xu
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Correspondence to Hongbo Liu.

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Liu, H., Liu, Z., Chen, Y. et al. Determining the position of a jammer using a virtual-force iterative approach. Wireless Netw 17, 531–547 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-010-0295-6

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