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

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.