Localization of a Power-Modulated Jammer

Abstract

Jamming is a malicious radio activity that represents a dreadful threat when employed in critical scenarios. Several techniques have been proposed to detect, locate, and mitigate jamming. Similarly, counter-counter-jamming techniques have been devised. This paper belongs to the latter thread. In particular, we propose a new jammer model: a power-modulated jammer that defies standard localization techniques. We provide several contributions: we first define a new mathematical model for the power-modulated jammer and then propose a throughout analysis of the localization error associated with the proposed power-modulated jammer, and we compare it with a standard power-constant jammer. Our results show that a power-modulated jammer can make the localization process completely ineffective—even under conservative assumptions of the shadowing process associated with the radio channel. Indeed, we prove that a constant-power jammer can be localized with high precision, even when coupled with a strong shadowing effect (σ ≈ 6 dBm). On the contrary, our power-modulated jammer, even in the presence of a very weak shadowing effect (σ < 2 dBm), presents a much wider localization error with respect to the constant-power jammer. In addition to being interesting on its own, we believe that our contribution also paves the way for further research in this area.