Fast jamming detection in sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are vulnerable to jamming attacks where an adversary injects strong noises to interfere with the normal transmission. It is crucial to detect such jamming attacks as fast as possible. Existing studies have shown that an effective indicator of jamming is the packet delivery ratio (PDR). However, current PDR-based schemes use the end-to-end packet delivery ratio, which requires one to observe communication for a long time before a good decision is made. In this paper, we propose collaborative detection, which evaluates the packet delivery ratio in an given area instead of a pair of nodes. The intuition is that the attacker often jams an area of his interest, not just two specific nodes. The benefit is that we can detect jamming attacks in a much faster way. We have evaluated the performance of our idea on TelosB motes. The results show that we can effectively and quickly detect jamming attacks.