An Assessment of Security Mechanisms Against Reactive Jammer Attack In Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been widely applied to various domains such as environmental monitoring and surveillance. Since wireless sensor networks utilize open transmission media, they are prone to radio jamming attacks. These attacks are easy to launch but difficult to defend. These attacks may lead to low network throughput because of jamming signals. Failure of data transmission in sensor networks is due to corruption of packets by reactive jammers. A number of defence techniques have been proposed in recent years to deal with these jammer attacks. However, each defence technique is suitable for only a limited network range and specific jamming conditions. This paper proposes an adaptive approach to detect and isolate the reactive jammers by using status messages and trigger identification service.