Efficient Jammed Area Mapping in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are vulnerable to different kinds of denial-of-Service attacks. One such common and easy-to-launch attack is physical or link layer jamming, where an adversary emits constant, high-amplitude noises disrupting the communication among nodes. An intelligent solution is to collaboratively map the jammed region and avoiding traffic through the jammed area. Wood propose such a jammed area mapping (J.A.M) protocol. However, the protocol has the problem of broadcast storm inside the jammed area. In this letter, a technique is presented that finds the nodes inside the jammed area without extensive flooding, thus reducing the traffic inside the jammed region substantially, while retaining the basic operation of J.A.M around the boundary. The solution relies on the localization services present in WSN and exploits this prepared knowledge of neighborhood for deducing the entire area from the perimeter. The result is a reliable and low-traffic version of J.A.M protocol. Simulation results show that the overall traffic involved in mapping can be reduced by 20%-25% using this approach.