Optimal Association Strategy of Multi-Gateway Wireless Sensor Networks Against Smart Jammers

The Internet of Things (IoT) immensely benefits from wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Unfortunately, WSNs, by virtue of being low-power, are vulnerable to physical jamming attacks. This letter focuses on WSNs with multiple gateways where potentially many sensors are under the attack of a smart jammer. The jammer can observe the communication links and selectively jam the transmission of some sensors such that the throughput of the WSN is minimized. The proposed defense method is to develop a gateway selection and sensors’ associations policy that is aware of the jammer’s existence. First, the conflict interaction between the WSN and the jammer is modeled as a Stackelberg game. Then the WSN’s strategy, leading to a Nash equilibrium, is derived which is both stable and optimal. The numerical results show that compared to existing alternative approaches, the proposed method, with only four gateways, can increase the throughput by more than 200% and saves around 30 dB in sensors’ power consumption.