Detection of jamming attacks in IEEE 802.15.4 low rate wireless personal area network using fuzzy systems

Abstract

Detection mechanism against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is a critical component of any security system as these attacks can affect the availability of a node or an entire network. In this work, we focus the jamming attacks at the PHY and MAC layers in IEEE 802.5.4 low rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN). This type of attack not only blocks the ongoing communication in the network, but also causes the wireless nodes to exhaust their energy much earlier than expected. Collisions in wireless networks occur due to varying factors such as jamming attacks, hidden terminal interferences and network congestion. To increase the reliability of attack detection, it is necessary to provide enhanced detection mechanisms that can determine the actual cause of channel collisions. To address this, we designed a fuzzy logic system to detect the jamming attacks in IEEE 802.1.5.4. It is an attack detection mechanism which uses an anomaly based approach and operates in a distributed manner and we can distinguish attack scenarios from the impact of traffic load on network behavior. By stimulation results, the system with high robustness ability and the effectiveness of our scheme in detection of jamming attacks with the improved precision.