Mitigating Wireless Jamming Attacks via Channel Migration

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a channel migration scheme to mitigate wireless jamming attacks. By exploiting the multiple wireless channels typically available on most wireless platforms, our scheme uses a flexible and resilient approach to switch communication channels, which enables wireless nodes to continue communication with their neighbors in the presence of jamming attacks. A nice property of the proposed scheme is that it does not depend on any single, fixed channel and executes in a decentralized and independent way on each wireless node. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed channel migration scheme, we apply the scheme to Seluge, a secure code dissemination system for wireless sensor networks, and evaluate the resulting protocol through both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation in a testbed of 72 MicaZ motes. Both results indicate that our channel migration scheme can effectively and efficiently mitigate jamming attacks.