Optimal adaptive antijamming in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been widely applied to various application domains such as environmental monitoring and surveillance. Because of reliance on the open transmission media, a sensor network may suffer from radio jamming attacks, which are easy to launch but difficult to defend. Attacked by jamming signals, a sensor network may experience corrupted packets and low network throughput. A number of defense techniques have been proposed. However, each defense technique is suitable for only a limited range of network and jamming conditions. This paper proposes an adaptive approach to antijamming for sensor networks by combining the strength of state-of-the-art antijamming techniques, which enables each node to adaptively select the optimal antijamming technique for different jamming conditions. The great challenge is that the sensor network undergoes varying jamming conditions over time. We address this challenge by formulating the antijamming problem of the sensor network as a Markov decision process and propose an efficient algorithm for computing the best antijamming strategy. By comprehensive simulation experiments, we demonstrate that a sensor network using the derived antijamming strategy can well defend from radio jamming attacks and in the meanwhile retain high energy efficiency. © 2012 Yanmin Zhu et al.