›› MIND Lab Seminar Series: 26 September 2007

Location Determination of an Unknown Machine in PinPoint Infrastructure

Neha Gupta
M.S. Student in Computer Science, University of Maryland at College Park

›› Logistics

Date: Wednesday, 26 September 2007

Time: 2:00p to 3:00p

Location: AVW 3258

›› Abstract

The algorithm is built on top of the PinPoint Algorithm. To give a brief overview, PinPoint is a location determination algorithm which uses inter-node packet delays as a measure of distance between nodes, but unlike the other time of arrival algorithms it doesn't assume that the clocks on different nodes are synchronized. It provides a mathematical way to compensate for the clock differences and does not require echo of messages. These points make PinPoint practical (because it doesn't require clock synchronization) and efficient (doesn't require O(n2) messages) for implementation.

PinPoint is a distributed algorithm and requires all the nodes to be PinPoint enabled to determine their respective locations. What we plan to pursue with the present scheme is to find the location of a machine which is not PinPoint enabled using PinPoint infrastructure i.e. using other nodes that follow the PinPoint algorithm.

One of the important uses of the algorithm is the detection of rogue access points in the network. A Rogue Access Point is a Wi-Fi (802.11) access point which is setup by an attacker for the purpose of sniffing wireless network traffic. They provide big security threats to the network. One of the questions that this algorithm answers is given that we know that there is a rogue access point in the network how will we find out the location of the point? Another use of the algorithm is, it is not necessary that all the nodes in a network are PinPoint enabled, there might be few visitor nodes also. This algorithm can be used to determine the location of any node which is not PinPoint enabled.