Efficient and timely jamming detection in wireless sensor networks

Wireless communication is vulnerable to jamming attacks, where an adversary injects strong noise to interfere with the legitimate transmissions. Jamming can easily disrupt a sensor application such as border monitoring. Since the area being jammed often tells the location of adversarial activities, e.g., illegal border crossing, it is critical to detect jamming efficiently and timely. It has been shown that the packet delivery ratio (PDR) is an effective indicator of jamming attacks. However, energy efficiency and detection timeliness are two conflicting requirements in existing PDR-based schemes. This paper proposes a novel jamming detection approach that is both efficient in terms of the additional overhead and timely in terms of the detection latency. The idea is to conduct two-phase detection. The first phase identifies the sign of jamming quickly and efficiently without adding any extra communication or requiring any special hardware or infrastructure. Any sign of jamming will trigger the second phase detection, which performs a short burst of channel probing to make an accurate decision. The benefits of the two-phase approach are analyzed in the paper. In addition, this paper also presents the detailed evaluation via experiments on a network of TelosB motes.