A survey on jamming attacks and countermeasures in WSNs

TLDR

Jamming is the most serious security threat in wireless sensor networks, capable of disabling even strong high‑layer security and is often overlooked during design. This article surveys jamming in WSNs, reviews related work, and identifies open research challenges for future study. We examine typical WSN protocols, their vulnerabilities, the various jamming techniques, and analyze existing countermeasures and open issues for defense.

Abstract

Jamming represents the most serious security threat in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as it can easily put out of order even WSNs that utilize strong highlayer security mechanisms, simply because it is often ignored in the initial WSN design. The objective of this article is to provide a general overview of the critical issue of jamming in WSNs and cover all the relevant work, providing the interested researcher pointers for open research issues in this field. We provide a brief overview of the communication protocols typically used in WSN deployments and highlight the characteristics of contemporary WSNs, that make them susceptible to jamming attacks, along with the various types of jamming which can be exercised against WSNs. Common jamming techniques and an overview of various types of jammers are reviewed and typical countermeasures against jamming are also analyzed. The key ideas of existing security mechanisms against jamming attacks in WSNs are presented and open research issues, with respect to the defense against jamming attacks are highlighted.