On the performance evaluation of LoRaWAN under Jamming

Abstract

In this paper we evaluate the performance of the LoRaWAN protocol under channel-aware and channel-oblivious jamming. We obtained three key results, namely: (i) LoRaWAN networks are particularly vulnerable to jamming attacks, we have shown that the network throughput of the simulation scenarios chosen can be decreased by ~ 56% when 25 jammers send unauthenticated packets permanently in the network, (ii) the gateway's performance is dramatically affected as a consequence of jammers. Our results suggest that the resources used to process packets coming from jammers could be 100 times higher than that of regular end-devices, and (iii) the network performance impact of jammers is highly correlated with the jammer class. We have shown that channel-oblivious jammers impacts the network performance widely, while channel-aware jammers impact the network locally. For this, we propose an ns-3 LoRaWAN module extension incorporating jamming attacks.