A Lightweight and Effective Jamming Detection in Electronic Shelf Label Systems

Modern retailers use electronic shelf label (ESL) systems to display and automatically update price information in supermarkets, thus, reducing manual labor and maintenance expenses. ESL systems usually consist of thousands of devices periodically communicating via radio channel in 2.4 GHz ISM band. Since ESLs are deployed in open environment, they are susceptible to many attacks that threaten to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) operation. The paper is devoted to the analysis of different jamming strategies, threatening to ESL system environment, and proposes fast, reliable and lightweight jamming detection method, suitable for the ESL systems. The suggested technique does not use additional hardware or require extra communication costs; its computational requirements are negligible. Its performance was evaluated by extensive simulations in Castalia-1.3 simulator.