Digital Filter Design for Jamming Mitigation in 802.15.4 Communication

Jamming attackers can dramatically increase attack efficiency and stealth by randomly or periodically cycling the jamming transmission on and off, attacks respectively known as random and periodic jamming. In this paper, we analyze the impact of such attacks on the IEEE 802.15.4 communication protocol, commonly used in wireless sensor networking applications, and show that the cycling behavior introduces a narrow spectral component into the received signal. We propose the inclusion of a digital filter at the receiver side to effectively eliminate this spectral component, and we discuss the benefits involved in this filter design. We evaluate the impacts of random and periodic jamming with and without the proposed filter, through implementation in software defined radios. Through our evaluation, we observe over 90% reduction in packet error rate with the proposed digital filter.