Defending against energy efficient link layer jamming denial of service attack in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to attacks due to their limited software and hardware capabilities. Energy efficient link layer jamming attacks have proven to be a real threat to wireless sensor networks. This type of attacks is able to prevent network communication for relatively long periods as it does not spend a lot of power while jamming. This paper proposes and evaluates two modifications to the Lightweight Medium Access Control (LMAC) [3] protocol. The first is Data Packet Separation Slot Size Randomization (DS-SSR); the second is Round Robin (RR) slot size assignment. The paper shows that (DS-SSR) can increase the WSN resistance against the Energy efficient denial of service link layer jamming attacks. The paper also shows that employing RR slightly eliminates the negative impact on the network throughput when using countermeasures against energy efficient jamming. Two measures are used to evaluate the resistance of the proposed protocol against the attack: lifetime advantage and censorship rate. Experimental results show that about 8 % reduction of the attacker lifetime advantage can be achieved with DS-SSR LMAC compared to other countermeasure. Furthermore, results show that the censorship rate of our proposed protocol was similar to the other countermeasures.