Description

• Jamming attacks are especially harmful when ensuring the dependability of wireless communication. • Finding the position of a jammer will enable the network to actively exploit a wide range of defense strategies. • In focus on developing mechanisms to localize a jammer by exploiting neighbor changes. • The first conduct jamming effect analysis to examine how the communication range alters with the jammer’s location and transmission power using free-space model. • The node’s affected communication range can be estimated purely by examining its neighbor changes caused by jamming attacks and thus perform the jammer location estimation by solving a least-squares (LSQ) problem that exploits the changes of communication range. • Compared with our previous iterative-search-based virtual force algorithm, our LSQ-based algorithm exhibits lower computational cost and higher localization accuracy. • The localization challenges in real systems by building the log-normal shadowing model empirically and devising an adaptive LSQ-based algorithm to address those challenges. • The extensive evaluation shows that the adaptive LSQ-based algorithm can effectively estimate the location of the jammer even in a highly complex propagation environment.