Sensor selection for mitigation of RSS-based attacks in wireless local area network positioning

Positioning in wireless networks has gained significant ground as an enabling technology for various applications such as event detection and context awareness. Since these positioning systems rely on radio features to locate a mobile, they are susceptible to non-cryptographic attacks resulting from malicious alteration of the propagation environment. This paper proposes a sensor selection scheme for increasing the resilience of fingerprinting-based positioning systems to RSS-based attacks in the context of wireless local area networks (WLAN). A distributed positioning scheme is proposed whereby an estimate is obtained from each WLAN access point (AP). Sensor selection is performed based on a nonparametric estimate of the Fisher information. Experimental results indicate superior performance compared to existing methods and graceful performance degradation in presence of RSS attacks.