Optimal anti-jamming strategy in sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely applied to various application domains such as environmental monitoring and surveillance. Because of reliance on the open transmission media, a sensor network may suffer from radio jamming attacks, which is easy to launch but difficult to defend. Attacked by jamming signals, a sensor network may experience corrupted packets and low network throughput. A number of defense techniques have been proposed. However, each defense technique is suitable for only a limited range of network and jamming conditions. This paper proposes an adaptive approach to anti-jamming for sensor networks by combining the strength of state-of-the-art anti-jamming techniques, which enables each node to adaptively select the optimal anti-jamming technique for different jamming conditions. The great challenge is that the sensor network undergoes varying jamming conditions over time. We address this challenge by formulating the anti-jamming problem of the sensor network as a Markov decision process and propose an efficient algorithm for computing the best anti-jamming strategy. By comprehensive simulation experiments, we demonstrate that a sensor network using the derived anti-jamming strategy can well defense from radio jamming attacks and in the meanwhile retain high energy-efficiency.