Impact of high-mobility radio jamming in large-scale wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Denial-Of-Service (DOS) attack is recognized as a biggest threat against the operation of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSN). Especially, high-mobility radio jamming like vehicles carrying radio jamming device can cause a serious damage in performance of WSNs. Because of resource-constraint design of sensor node, it is hard to provide enough protection against high-mobility jamming attack. Therefore, large-scale WSNs are extremely vulnerable to that type of DOS attack. Recognizing the importance of the problem, we conducted a simulation study to investigate the impact of radio jamming on the performance of a large-scale WSN. Based on the simulation results, the moving speed of radio jamming source has the most conspicuous effects on the WSN performance such as packet delivery success ratio and delay. As the speed changes from 8 rn/sec to 1 m/sec, the success ratio drops by up to 10%. On the other hand, the delay increases by up to 55%. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.