Lightweight jammer localization in wireless networks: System design and implementation

Abstract

Jamming attacks have become prevalent during the last few years, due to the shared nature and the open access to the wireless medium. Finding the location of a jamming device is of great importance for restoring normal network operations. After detecting the malicious node we want to find its position, in order for further security actions to be taken. Our goal in this paper is the design and implementation of a simple, lightweight and generic localization algorithm. Our scheme is based on the principles of the gradient descent minimization algorithm. The key observation is that the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) has lower values as we move closer to the jammer. Hence, the use of a gradient-based scheme, operating on the discrete plane of the network topology, can help locate the jamming device. The contributions of our work are the following: (a) We demonstrate, through analysis and experimentation, the way that the jamming effects propagate through the network in terms of the observed PDR. (b) We design a distributed, lightweight jammer localization system which does not require any modifications to the driver/firmware of commercial NICs. (c) We implement and evaluate our localization system on our 802.11 indoor testbed. An attractive and important feature of our system is that it does not rely on special hardware.