On the issues of selective jamming in IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless body area networks

Abstract

The beacon-enabled mode of IEEE 802.15.4 provides a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) method for low power devices by adopting Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS). GTS communication is a potential target for selective jammers where they perform GTS attacks. In GTS attacks, the adversary selectively picks one of the reserved device slots to corrupt its incoming communication. Considering countermeasures, most existing solutions rely on slot position randomization to distribute the harm of the attack over the other GTS slots. These solutions may be effective in the case of full-slot jamming. However, the introduced GTS attacks consider only TDMA property of GTS communication and ignore other important properties like the protocol behavior and the superframe structure effect on the traffic. Considering these properties while performing GTS attacks exempts the adversary from full-slot jamming and renders the existing solutions with no effect. In this paper, we introduce a new efficient version of GTS attacks that benefits from both the standard behavior and the superframe effect on the periodic traffic to conserve the adversary’s resources for the longest period. Additionally, we provide a solution specially developed to mitigate the harm from this detrimental attack. From extensive simulations conducted in this work, it follows that the attack is economic in terms of jamming duration and jamming packets ratio and the solution is efficient in terms of packet delivery ratio, energy consumption and delay overhead.