Exploiting Radio Irregularity for Location Verification in Sparse MANETs

Abstract

Traditional distance-based location verification system (LVS) is ineffective for some attacks in sparse mobile ad hoc networks, e.g., the similar distance-based malicious (SDM) attack. In this letter, we propose to exploit radio irregularity to build a novel LVS. Our system detects attack based on the estimated difference of radio irregularity coefficients and the claimed locations of the malicious node and an assistant node. To the best of our knowledge, our system is the first-of-its-kind that can detect SDM attack and pollution attack with only the received signal strength indicator information transmitted by a detecting node to the suspicious malicious node and an assistant node. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed system can detect the attacks that cannot be detected by traditional distance-based methods.