Novel channel-hopping pattern-based wireless IoT networks in smart cities for reducing multi-access interference and jamming attacks

Yiming Liu,Yue Zhao,Yao Hao,Kaijun Wu,Qi Zeng

doi:10.1186/s13638-021-02029-8

Abstract

In smart cities, the Internet-of-Thing (IoT) provides an enabling communication infrastructure to support tremendous amount of data exchange. Most IoT applications, e.g., wireless local area network, Bluetooth and so forth, utilize the channel-hopping scheme to suppress the transmission security threats. In this paper, to reduce the mutual interference and external jamming attacks, multiple novel channel-hopping patterns, i.e., traditional no-hit-zone (NHZ) hopping pattern and generalized NHZ hopping pattern, are introduced to suit to IoT networks. Particularly the design of probabilistic hopping pattern is first proposed, which has the various usage probabilities with regard to various channels. The properties of these hopping patterns are investigated by the step-to-step examples. Then, the error-rate performance of the multi-node IoT systems adopting these hopping patterns in the presence of jamming attacks is comprehensively analyzed. The extensive simulations show that the traditional/generalized NHZ hopping patterns are in favor of combating the mutual interference but with the limited capability of reducing jamming attacks, while the probabilistic hopping pattern possesses the opposite feature, that is, it has the predominant merit in suppressing jamming attacks. Thus, the novel channel-hopping pattern-based IoT could provide the secure transmission for communication applications in smart cities. Note that, as the physical-layer security technique, the channel-hopping patterns investigated in this paper are convenient to integrate with the security policies implemented in upper layers (e.g., encryption, authentication and so forth).

Highlights

The smart cities contain lots of applications and sensors nodes, such as smart home appliances, smart grid applications, weather and temperature sensors, smart buildings and so forth [1, 2]
The previous solutions to the cyber security mainly focused on encryption and authentication in the upper layers [4,5,6,7,8,9,10], but they are ineffective to the denial-of-service attacks
8.1 Results In this paper, we have focused on the channel-hopping pattern-based multi-node IoT networks in smart cities for reducing both the mutual interference and the external jamming attacks

Summary

Introduction

The smart cities contain lots of applications and sensors nodes, such as smart home appliances, smart grid applications, weather and temperature sensors, smart buildings and so forth [1, 2]. The IoT networks are characterized by the open architecture allowing the legitimate nodes to conveniently access to each other; this architecture causes the severe cyber-security issues emitted by the vicious nodes, e.g., denial-of-service attacks, eavesdropping, privacy and jamming. The previous solutions to the cyber security mainly focused on encryption and authentication in the upper layers [4,5,6,7,8,9,10], but they are ineffective to the denial-of-service attacks (e.g., jamming and interference). In the physical and media access layers, the mutual interference and the hostile jamming attack are the main impacts on the performance of wireless IoT, which have attracted lots of attentions in industry and academics [14,15,16,17,18,19]. The physical-layer security techniques offer distinct advantages compared to cryptography and authentication, because these techniques have high scalability but are independent on computational complexity

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Results

Conclusion