Identification and Localization of the Jammer in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network can be easily attacked by jammers for its shared character and open access to the wireless channel. Jamming attack could produce a significant threat to the network by interrupting the normal transmission of nodes. To this end, several anti-jamming countermeasures have been proposed to improve the quality of service of the wireless sensor network. As an important building block for anti-jamming countermeasures, the estimation of jammer’s location could provide us a possible way to eliminate jammers artificially. However, existing localization algorithms mainly pay attention to locate the jammers that are equipped with omnidirectional antennas, which usually fail to cope with directional jammers. In order to bridge this gap, an algorithm of antenna identification and localization of the jammer (AILJ) based on the topology information of jamming scenarios is put forward in this paper. At first, a collection protocol is designed to collect the information of boundary nodes and jammed nodes. Then, an identification method based on the classification of the boundary nodes is proposed to derive the type of jammer’s antenna. At last, a range-free method is put forward to locate the jammer without relying on the propagation parameters. The proposed AILJ only depends on the localization of jammed nodes and boundary nodes and employs their geometry knowledge. For the omnidirectional jammer, the mean center of two circumcircles is considered as the jammer’s position. For the directional jammer, the mean value of the intersections between the straight line that represents jammer’s direction and the circumcircles is considered as the directional jammer’s position. Finally, a series of experiments have been conducted to evaluate the identification and localization performance of AILJ.