A novel range-free jammer localization solution in wireless network by using PSO Algorithm

In wireless networks, jamming attacks are easy to launch and can significantly impact the network performance. The technique which localizes the jamming attacker is useful to address this problem. Some range-based localization schemes depend on the additional hardware of wireless nodes too much, and they can not work in resource-constrained wireless networks. Solutions in range-free localization are being pursued as a cost-effective alternative to more expensive range-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel range-free algorithm to localize the source of the attacker. We show that our approach only relies on the positions of each jammed or no-jammed node in the network, PSO algorithm is used to get the minimum covering circle of jammed positions and the circle center is the estimated jammer location. We compare our work with some existing range-free solutions via extensive simulations in two models, which are wireless sensor network (WSN) and vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) respectively. The experimental results suggest that our proposed algorithm achieves higher accuracy than the other solutions, and the localization error goes down with larger number of recorded jammed positions. In additional, when the recorded jammed positions are distributed in a specific constrained area, the localization error goes higher, we also propose an improved PSO algorithm to deal with this issue.