A HYBRID TECHNIQUE FOR DEFENSE AGAINST BASE STATION JAMMING IN WSN

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), a large number of distributed sensors collaborate to deliver information to the Base Stations (BSs). As WSNs gain popularity, providing security and trustworthiness is an issue of critical importance. A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is characterized by an explicit attempt to prevent the legitimate use of a service. Jamming is one form of DoS attack, which prevents sources from communicating. WSNs are highly susceptible to jamming attacks due to high possibility of sensor capture and compromise, and their resource limitations. In WSN architecture, BS is a single point of failure, because it collects sensor readings and performs command and control tasks. So BSs are main targets of the jamming attack. For mitigating the effects of BS jamming attacks, we propose a hybrid technique of defense, which combines 3 defense techniques. The first technique is BS replication, so that in a jamming condition, there may be some unjammed replicated BSs for providing service to the network. The second technique is the evasion of BS from jammed location to any unjammed location. The third technique is multipath routing to provide alternative paths for communication with the BS in case of jamming of one or more paths. We have performed a simulative evaluation of our proposed technique to compare it with the scenarios of WSNs with no defense technique, single defense technique of BS replication and combination of two defense techniques of BS replication with evasion. A comparison of these techniques has been done with respect to legitimate traffic analysis, jamming traffic analysis and relative power consumption in WSNs. Results show that the proposed hybrid technique gives better results for all the above metrics. In order to simulate the proposed technique, we used a discrete event simulator called QualNet 4.5. The code for simulating multipath routing protocol is written in C++. The simulation runs under the Windows platform on a Pentium Core 2 duo machine.